Economics Nobel Prize 2012

The Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to US economists Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth for their work on market design. Market design is a subfield of microeconomics that studies how to make markets work efficiently. By efficiently (also called Pareto efficiency), economists mean that the outcome (in terms of who gets what in the market) cannot be improved without making at least one person worse off. Most often this outcome can be achieved by letting people freely trade goods using money as a means of exchange. However, there are some cases where money cannot be used. For example, Alvin Roth studied the market for kidney transplants where buying kidneys is not allowed on ethical grounds. By creating a database of likely donors and patients along with an algorithm to match them, his work allowed to increase the number of transplants and therefore of lives saved. Below is a lecture from Alvin Roth where he explains this case and other applications of market design:


At a time when economists are often criticized for encouraging deregulation and letting markets go wild while unchecked, it is interesting to note that the Nobel committee chose to highlight the positive contributions of economic science to the World.


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