Alvin E. Roth shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for designing stable market-matching systems.
Roth shared the award with Lloyd S. Shapley. Their work concerned matching people or organizations when money is not the main mechanism, such as assigning students to schools, doctors to hospitals, or recipients to organ donors. The goal is to create outcomes that are stable and acceptable to the participants.
Shapley developed mathematical foundations for stable matching, including the deferred acceptance algorithm. Roth showed how such ideas could be tested and applied in real markets, and he helped redesign matching systems used in education and medical training.
A common mix-up is naming Shapley, who was Roth’s co-laureate. The prize citation referred to the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. Roth is an American economist born in 1951.