By Steve Mosco
Economist Alvin Roth, a Queens native who currently works as a professor at Stanford University, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Roth, who attended Martin Van Buren High School in Queens Village, received the honor Monday for work that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited as “the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.”
According to the academy, the award “honors work that provided a deeper understanding of how markets work and put that knowledge to use for the practical benefit of humanity.”
Roth received the prize for devising better match-ups among students and the schools they wish to attend and between kidney donors and recipients. Roth is credited with implementing concrete uses for the match-making theories of UCLA Professor Lloyd Shapley, with whom the economist will share the $1.2 million prize.
Roth, the McCaw Senior Visiting Professor of Economics at Stanford and a Stanford alumnus who will become a full faculty member at the start of 2013, is a pioneer in the field of game theory and experimental economics and in their application in the design of new economic institutions.
Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy, who described Roth’s recent arrival at Stanford as “fortuitous,” praised the economist as not only “an extraordinary researcher and teacher, admired worldwide by other economists” but also “a heck of a nice human being.”
Reach reporter Steve Mosco by e-mail at smosco@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4546.
