I visited Stockholm this summer after the EURO Conference. While in Stockholm, I visited the Nobel Prize Museum to celebrate the achievements of the laureates, including the operations research Nobel laureates. The Nobel Prize Museum displays items from many of the laureates. I was delighted to see Alvin Roth’s “Mr. Matching” T-shirt in the exhibit. Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley were awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for “the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.”

How to bring different players together in the best possible way is a key economic problem. Lloyd Shapley studied different matching methods theoretically and, beginning in the 1980s, Alvin Roth used Shapley’s theoretical results to explain how markets function in practice. Through empirical studies and lab experiments, Roth demonstrated that stability was critical to successful matching methods. Roth has also developed systems for matching doctors with hospitals, school children with schools, and organ donors with patients. [From NobelPrize.org]

You can read more about Al Roth’s prize here and Lloyd Shapley’s prize here.

You can also read about Al Roth’s research in a book he wrote entitled Who gets what–and why: The new economics of matchmaking and market design. This interesting book makes matching markets accessible, and I highly recommend it.

“Alvin Roth’s “Mr. Matching” T-shirt at the Nobel Prize Museum