Alvin E. Roth
Alvin Eliot Roth (born December 18, 1951) is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2017. Roth has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics, and is known for his emphasis on applying economic theory to solutions for "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". Biography Alvin Roth was born in the New York City borough of Queens to Ernest and Lillian Roth, who were both public high school teachers and Jewish. Roth followed his brother Ted Roth in attending the Science Honors Program at Columbia University, which offered classes to junior high school and high school students on Saturdays and entered Columbia's engineering school in the Fall of 1968 when he was 16, without having graduated from high school. Roth graduated from Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1971 with a bachelor's degree in Operations Research.