As I mentioned in my last post, 2012 Nobel Prize winner Al Roth visited Duke Law School this week as a guest of the Law & Markets project. We basically worked Al to death while he was here – he gave three talks in a single day: a casual morning discussion over coffee with my Taboo Trades students and select faculty; a lunchtime public lecture about his book, Who Get’s What And Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design; and an afternoon faculty workshop on Global Kidney Exchange (sometimes called Reverse Transplant Tourism). And that’s not counting the breakfasts, lunch, and dinner he had with faculty who wanted to hear even more about market design. I was exhausted from just watching him in action.
Those who know Al won’t be surprised by that, I suspect. As I’ve discussed before in prior posts (here and here), Al is deservedly well-known for his generosity in sharing his time and expertise with students, colleagues, and even know-nothings like me.
Whether by design or happy accident (I’m not sure which, though he is a market designer, hmm . . . ) there was little overlap in the content of the three talks, though each one built on the other and someone who attended all three (as many of us did) could gain new insight into market design at each stage. The morning session focused primarily on labor markets, especially the judicial clerkship market and market for summer associates and how that compared to the market for new medical residents. As Al discusses in the book, the market for judicial clerks, unlike the market for medical residents, is one in which attempts to prevent market unraveling have been largely unsuccessful. We talked a bit about why that might be and it was interesting to have that discussion among someone who has studied that market (Al), current market participants (the students), prior participants (law professors) and those who have negotiated some of the earlier (failed) agreements – law school administrators.
The lunch talk focused on the concept of market design more generally, but with an emphasis on school choice, kidney exchange, and high frequency trading as examples. The afternoon session was devoted to Al’s current work on repugnant transactions and Global Kidney Exchange, an issue we have both worked on with Mike Rees.
It was a really special day all around, but I was especially happy to get a chance to share Al in person with my Taboo Trades students. They have already spent more time thinking about repugnant transactions than most people ever will, and it was great for them to have a chance to meet “The Pied Piper of Repugnance,” as I referred to Al some years ago, in person. We memorialized his visit with us in the photo above.
Prior posts about Al Roth:
Al Roth: The Pied Piper of Repugnance?
Al Roth, Market Designer, in August Forbes
Prior posts about Global Kidney Exchange/Reverse Transplant Tourism: collected here
Prior posts about the Taboo Trades seminar: collected here
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