Quotes from Alvin E. Roth

I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.

Market design is about understanding the details of markets in sufficient detail so that we can help fix them when they are broken.

A lot of people are surprised economists are assisting with kidney exchanges. Exchanges are what economists are good at.

I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.

Mutual interest is what separates courting couples from stalker and prey.)

Even if you eat only a light breakfast, you likely benefit from the global reach of multiple markets.

The only country in which it is legal to buy and sell kidneys from living donor/sellers is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Legal markets were permitted there after the need for kidneys spiked during the Iran-Iraq War.

What often makes matching markets especially challenging is that everyone has to puzzle through not only their own desires but also those of everyone else and how all those other market participants might act to achieve their preferences.

Each of these ubiquitous marketplaces has found a way to succeed not only in making markets thick, uncongested, and safe, but also in making them simple to use.

Turning a market into a commodity market helps make it really thick, because any buyer can buy from any seller, and any seller can sell to any buyer.

In Israel, living kidney donors are now offered forty days' pay at their current wage, even if they don't miss that many days of work, and they are promised priority on the deceased-donor waiting list, in case they should ever need a transplant themselves.)

market that can operate freely is like a wheel that can turn freely: it needs an axle and well-oiled bearings. How to provide that axle and keep those bearings well oiled is what market design is about.

Faced with complicated choices like this, many parents understandably played it safe. About 80 percent of the children were assigned to the school that their parents had listed first. On paper, the system looked hugely successful, with most participants appearing to have received their first choices. But the reality was very different: many of those parents were simply getting safe, strategic choices.

Thus judges on the D.C. Circuit promptly moved the hiring of 2014 clerks before Labor Day. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, for example, was widely reported to have hired a clerk named Shon Hopwood in the first week of August 2013. Hopwood has an unusual personal history: before entering law school he served a lengthy prison sentence. But his early hiring quickly became quite usual. Clerks who wouldn't begin work until 2015 were being hired in February 2014, a year and a half early.

Signals such as high grades—or a peacock's tail or big bank building—don't indicate interest; they are marks of desirability. That is, the gaudy tail doesn't signal how much the peacock is interested in a particular peahen; it signals how much the hens should be attracted to that particular cock.

How come? I think of this as an illustration of what I call "the Iron Law of Marriage," which says that you can't be happier than your spouse.

the tension between commoditization and product differentiation — that is, between wanting to sell in a thick market to buyers even if they don't care who you are, and trying to make your product special enough that many buyers will care enough about you to seek you out.

Unfortunately, it's hard to make rules constraining lawyers, because many lawyers earn their living by obeying the letter of the law while evading its intent.

The thickness of the Amazon marketplace — the ready availability of so many buyers and sellers — is self-reinforcing.

Clancy Goldfinger, former managing partner of Catchum, Killum, and Eatum, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1951 and clerked for Judge XXX and Justice YYY, passed away Tuesday.")

Meanwhile, some private schools even enroll students at birth. At the Wetherby School in England, a school Princes William and Harry attended, the spaces reserved by newborns fill up early each month, and the school advises women scheduling cesarean sections to have them on the first of the month, if possible, to get a place before all the spots are gone.

Building a better mousetrap isn't always rewarded when the mice have a say in the matter

If you bought a copy of this book, you own it and can choose to keep it, sell it, give it away, or review it.

When you're doing kidney transplants, you have to find out who can exchange kidneys with whom, doing blood tests to make sure it's true. You can't just work on the preliminary data. Then you have to organize the logistics.