There’s a great article in the August
issue of Forbes magazine about Al Roth, the Gund Professor of Economics and
Business Administration, Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business
School, who we blog about frequently here at the Lounge. (See here,
here,
and here,
for example).
The article begins:
Roth uses the mathematical tools of game theory to find fixes for big, broken systems. Over the last 20 years he has pioneered a branch of economics known as market design. Among Roth's accomplishments: designing networks for kidney donations and creating elegant systems that enable huge urban school districts to optimally place multitudes of students among hundreds of schools.
"He's unusual, because he's highly respected as a theorist, but he's also working directly in the field," observes Eric Maskin, an economist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. and corecipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in economics for theoretical work on market design. "Al has managed to find ways to adapt the theory in very clever and ingenious ways."
The article then goes on to discuss some of the market design problems Roth has successfully tackled: New York City's high school match, which prior to Roth’s intervention in 2003 was so flawed that a third of NYC high schoolers didn’t participate; Boston's public school system; and the medical school graduates residency program matching system.
One of the market designs for which Roth is best known is kidney exchange. As the article explains:
A set of dismaying facts led Roth to design a system for matching incompatible kidney donor pairs and lone altruistic donors with other donors and recipients. The waiting list for donor kidneys stretches to 85,000 in the U.S., and 4,000 patients die each year as a result of the organ shortage. In 2003 Roth started work on a system that would allow people who want to donate kidneys to loved ones but can't because their blood types don't match, to exchange organs with other incompatible donor pairs. At this point the numbers of kidneys transplanted using Roth's system is small, fewer than 1,000 in 2009. But the potential is promising. "Al's work on kidney matching is one of the few great modern advances in transplant policy," says the American Enterprise Institute's Sally Satel.
According to Roth, kidney exchange provides both frustration
and satisfaction. One of the
sources of satisfaction was evident
on Roth’s site last week. The
following e-mail, whose author gave Roth permission to post the email and
accompanying photo:
Dear Dr. Roth,
I want to thank you for your role in establishing the New England Program for Kidney Exchange. On July 8 my husband Bryan, in a 3-way swap with donor/ recipient pairs at Hopkins, RIH/ Brown and Dartmouth, received his new kidney after years of failing health. He is already feeling remarkably better, and his new kidney is functioning well.
Here is a photo of our 3-year-old, Lincoln, and 3-month-old, Haven, thanking Bryan's brother for donating his kidney to a stranger at Hopkins so Bryan could receive one from Dartmouth. I can imagine that theoretical academic work can lack a human face at times, so I wanted to assure you that your work is truly changing lives. I can't thank you enough for giving my boys their Daddy back.
Yours,
Katie Silberman
Providence
Not many of us manage such academic success, while also impacting the daily lives of thousands of people.
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