The Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics

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Curriculum Vitae

Al Roth's
Game Theory, Experimental Economics, and Market Design Page

Market Design Blog

Job Market Candidates

I'm the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University (and the Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard).

I work in the areas of game theory, experimental economics and market design, and shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Table of Contents

• Very short introductory articles and press [Updated 6/18/12 The Chronicle of Higher Education takes an interest in the job market for economists: Stanford Lures Alvin Roth and 2 Other Economists From Harvard]
• Short expository papers [Updated 5/11/12: Roth, Alvin E. "In 100 Years," January 2012, (for a volume of predictions by economists, In 100 Years, edited by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, MIT Press, forthcoming)].
• Video and Audio: Lectures and Radio Interviews [Updated 7/26/12 Random Graph Models in Kidney Exchange - Theoretical Developments and Practical Challenges (the movie), presented at MSR New England, July 25, 2012. The video runs an hour and a half, including the questions at the end.] .
• Slide Presentations [Updated 3/19/10 On March 15, 2010 I gave a 15 minute presentation as part of a Congressional Briefing on the usefulness of Economics (particularly economic research supported by the NSF). Here are my slides: Improved Markets for Doctors, Organ Transplants and School Choice.]
• Market Design [Updated 10/8/07]
• My Surveys of Market Design [Updated 12/2/10: What have we learned from market design? Update to Roth (2008): September, 2010, (forthcoming in El Trimestre Economico)).]
• Medical and Health Care Labor Markets
  • National Resident Matching Program and related medical labor markets [Updated 10/12/10 Comment on the NRMP’s “Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program” Proposed to Replace the Post-Match Scramble by Peter A. Coles, Clayton R. Featherstone, John William Hatfield, Fuhito Kojima, Scott Duke Kominers, Muriel Niederle, Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth. ]
  • Antitrust suit against the NRMP [Updated 4/4/07: updating links after plaintiff website dismantled following Supreme Court denial of cert.]
  • Gastroenterologists, Orthopaedic surgeons (from centralized to decentralized and back again) [Updated 11/25/09: Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth,''The Effects of a Central Clearinghouse on Job placement, Wages, and Hiring Practice'', in Labor Market Intermediation, David Autor, Editor, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, 273-306. ]
• Kidney Exchange (also called "Kidney Paired Donation" or Paired Kidney donation) [Updated 8/06/12 Rees, Michael A.,  Mark A. Schnitzler, Edward Zavala, James A. Cutler,  Alvin E. Roth, F. Dennis Irwin, Stephen W. Crawford,and Alan B.  Leichtman, “Call to Develop a Standard Acquisition Charge Model for Kidney Paired Donation,” American Journal of Transplantation, 2012, 12, 6 (June), 1392-1397. In August 2012 the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality awarded a grant to gather data to support the establishment of a standard acquisition charge for living donor kidneys used in kidney exchange.]
• Other organ transplantation issues[Updated 8/4/11 Kessler, Judd B. and Alvin E. Roth, '' Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate,'' American Economic Review, forthcoming..]
• School choice mechanisms [Updated 5/02/12 IIPSC's projects include helping design and implement school choice systems in New Orleans, Denver and Washington DC. Here's a May 2012 article about Parag Pathak that focuses on his work on schools and school choice: Game theory in the real world. .]
• Decentralized Markets, and market failures--congestion, unraveling, market culture
[Updated 10/3/11 :Roth, Alvin E, "Marketplace institutions related to the timing of transactions, and reply to Priest (2010)" October, 2010. (Here is the shorter version that is forthcoming in Journal of Labor Economics, maybe in April 2012)]
• Repugnant Markets [Updated 6/01/12: My paper "In 100 Years" includes some speculation on transactions whose repugnance may change one way or another in the future (and it got a nice plug here--apparently Stephen Dubner has an attraction to repugnance...:)]
• Market for Law clerks [Updated7/20/12: Here are the dates and rules in the Federal Judges Law Clerk Hiring Plan for 2012, but the plan, which has been on it's last legs for a surprisingly long time, may finally be dead: see my blog post The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan is pretty much over ]
• AEA market for new economists [Updated 1/4/11: Peter Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, and John J. Siegfried , " The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24,4 (Fall) 2010, 187-206]
• eCommerce [Updated 7/15/08: The data from the Roth and Ockenfels 2002 eBay/Amazon study are now posted here.]
• Other economic design (maybe not always of markets) [Updated .]
• Other market design links (researchers, 2007 Nobel Prize for "foundations of mechanism design theory", other designed markets, class materials, presentations, software, conferences...) [Updated 7/20/12: The European network for research on matching practices in education and early labour markets has a list of matching theorists and market designers in Europe, as well as some material on matching institutions in Europe.]
  • Conferences [Updated 9/1/10 NBER Market Design Group Conference, October 8 and 9, 2010 ]

• Experimental Economics [Updated 2/23/08: Roth, A.E., "On the Early History of Experimental Economics," Francesco Guala's History of Experimental Economics.]

• Handbook of Experimental Economics [Updated 4/2/12: link to most recent chapters:.Voluntary Giving to Public Goods by Lise Vesterlund (updated February 10, 2011, taken down for further revision);Neuroeconomics by Colin Camerer, Jonathan Cohen, Ernst Fehr, Paul Glimcher and David Laibson, updated November 2011, Learning and the Economics of Small Decisions, by Ido Erev and Ernan Haruvy updated, February 1, 2012, Experiments in Market Design (Jan 2012 draft) (Roth) .]
  • Volume 1, 1995: detailed Tables of Contents and some reviews
  • Volume 2, in preparation: list of proposed chapters and authors, and links to chapters as they become ready for review.
• Prediction [Updated 7/25/11:Ert, Eyal, Ido Erev, and Alvin E. Roth, “A Choice Prediction Competition for Social Preferences in Simple Extensive Form Games: An Introduction,” Games, 2011, 2, no. 3: 257-276.]
• Things to participate in: Experiments on the web, tournaments, conferences, experiments at Harvard [Updated 2/1/12: Conference: 3rd LeeX International Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics in Universitat Pompeu Fabra. June 18-19, 2012. Keynote speakers are: Shyam Sunder, Yale University, and Ramón Marimón, European University Institute. The conference organizers are: John Duffy, University of Pittsburgh, Frank Heinemann, Technical University of Berlin, Rosemarie Nagel , ICREA and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Deadline Friday, 16 March, 2012. 
  Summer school:  Fifth Barcelona LeeX Experimental Economics Summer School in
  Macroeconomics, BLESS-M-2012, June 11-15, 2012 inUniversitat Pompeu Fabra. The summer school organizers and lecturers are: John Duffy, University of Pittsburgh Frank Heinemann, Technical University of Berlin, Rosemarie Nagel, ICREA and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and guest lecturers are Charles Noussair, Tilburg University, and  Shyam Sunder, Yale University. Deadline Sunday, 1 April 2012.]
• Other experimental servers
• Other labs and experimenters [Updated 11/6/11 Monash University has an active experimental economics group that includes Klaus Abbink, Nick Feltovich, Lata Gangadharan, Phil Grossman, Andreas Leibbrandt, Vai-Lam Mui, Birendra Rai, and Anmol Ratan. ]
• Experiments in the classroom [Updated 4/23/08: John Hey's class Introduction to Experimental Economics.]
• Experimental Philosophy, and Philosophy of Experimental Economics and Game Theory [Updated 2/12/10: here's a paper that is optimistic about how well social preferences measured in the lab predict outside the lab behavior: Baran, Nicole, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales Can We Infer Social Preferences from the Lab? Evidence from the Trust Game]
Conduct of Science [Updated 11/18/09: A book review Physics and Pixie Dust, of the 2009 book " PLASTIC FANTASTIC: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World," by Eugenie S. Reich covers the prolific fraud of the (supposed) physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, a researcher at Bell Laboratories who apparently fabricated dozens of papers reporting astonishing results in a short time. (" At Schön's peak, he was submitting 4 or 5 articles per month, most of them going to top journals like Science and Nature . ") ]

• Game Theory
  • Learning, and cognitive game theory [Updated 8/1/07: Erev, Ido, Alvin E. Roth, Robert L. Slonim, and Greg Barron, ''Learning and equilibrium as useful approximations: accuracy of prediction on randomly selected constant sum games,'' Economic Theory, special issue: Behavioral Game Theory Symposium, 33, 2007, 29-51.]
  • Other game theory servers
  • Other pages on which game theory intersects with experiments
  • Game Theory Journals [Updated 4/19/10:A new online game theory journal called Games made a 2010 appearance.]
  • Evolution, evolutionary game theory, learning, and dynamics [Updated 5/18/08: VirtualLabs in evolutionary game theory has some tutorials.]
  • Game theory in computer science [Updated 8/7/09: Cornell is hosting a September 2009 conference on Research Issues at the Interface of Computer Science and Economics]
  • Game theory in the classroom [Updated 4/4/09: Game Theory with Professor Ben Polak at Yale. ]
  • Other servers devoted to game theory (including some blogs by game theorists) [Updated 7/2/09: blogs run by game theorists: Algorithmic Game Theory, Noam Nisan's blog. Cheap Talk, by Jeff Ely and Sandeep Baliga, Leisure of the Theory Class by Eran Shmaya and Rakesh Vohra, Market Design by Peter Coles and me.]
  • Other game theorists, and miscellaneous game theory connections [Updated 6/27/10: The 21st International Conference on Game Theory at Stony Brook University from July 12-16, 2010, is in honor of Bob Aumann's 80th birthday, and will have a day of talks in Honor of Shmuel Zamir's 70th birthday. ]

• Bibliographies [Updated 10/3/11: Duke University Libraries now has a collection of my old papers: Inventory of the Alvin Roth Papers, 1960s-2000]