I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.
From Alvin E. Roth
My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student.
Experimental economics is about conducting experiments: bringing economics into the laboratory or creating controlled conditions in the field that allow us to understand better what we are seeing in less controlled circumstances.
Market design is about understanding the details of markets in sufficient detail so that we can help fix them when they are broken.
Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.
A lot of people are surprised economists are assisting with kidney exchanges. Exchanges are what economists are good at.
Often people expect I have some touching personal story about kidney disease, but it's actually the mathematics that led me to it.
I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'
I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.
When you're doing kidney transplants, you have to find out who can exchange kidneys with whom, doing blood tests to make sure it's true. You can't just work on the preliminary data. Then you have to organize the logistics.
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