Alvin E. Roth quotes

Alvin E. Roth is an American economist and educator, renowned for his work in market design and game theory. His groundbreaking research has transformed areas such as organ donation, school choice, and labor markets. He has received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his significant contributions to economics. Here are 8 of his quotes:

Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.

Alvin E. Roth

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.

Alvin E. Roth

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.

Alvin E. Roth

Maybe we could think of science as being like a nuclear chain reaction in which people and ideas bounce off each other, and if critical mass is reached, a new field is formed.

Alvin E. Roth

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

Alvin E. Roth

Experimental economics is about conducting experiments: bringing economics into the laboratory or creating controlled conditions in the field that allow us to understand better what we are seeing in less controlled circumstances.

Alvin E. Roth

Often people expect I have some touching personal story about kidney disease, but it's actually the mathematics that led me to it.

Alvin E. Roth