Alvin Elliot Roth is a professor of economics at Stanford University and emeritus professor of economics and business administration at Harvard University.

Roth has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics, and has applied his theories to many "real-world" problems. In 2012, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design".

Their work primarily applies to markets that do not have prices, or at least have strict constraints on prices. The laureates’ breakthroughs involve figuring out how to properly assign people and things to stable matches when prices are not available to help buyers and sellers pair up.

Roth has put these theories to practical use, in his work on a program that matches new doctors to hospitals and more recently for a project matching kidney donors. Public school systems in New York, Boston, Chicago and Denver use an algorithm based on his work to help assign students to schools.

Roth has spent the last 30 years trying to make economics more like an engineering discipline. The idea is to try to diagnose why resource allocation systems are not working, and how they can be engineered to produce something better.

Alvin Roth received his bachelor’s from Columbia University and his master’s degree and PhD from Stanford University, all in operations research.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2012/roth.html

http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/alroth.html