Alvin E. Roth People Quotations

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 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.

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.'

Maybe we could think of science as being like a nuclear chain reaction in which people and ideas bounce off each other, and if critical mass is reached, a new field is formed.