Alvin Roth – författare

Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth argues that our most important and difficult decisions - about our most controversial issues - require a different calculation of what matters most.Our intuitive and automatic thinking is influenced - in ways we don't always recognize - by strongly-held notions of repugnance. A transaction is repugnant if some people want to engage in it, and others think they shouldn't be allowed to. You Can't Do That explores how ideas about repugnance have changed drastically over time, and examines the causes and consequences of forbidding transactions in our most intimate relationships (such as sex, reproduction, or donating blood) and our commercial relationships (finance, labor, or data use).Leading economist Alvin Roth turns his attention to a controversial set of markets to answer difficult questions about allowing, regulating or forbidding certain transactions. Should narcotics be legalised? Should we allow compensation for kidney donors, or let thousands of people die each year while waiting for an altruistic kidney? Should we allow physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients who desire death with dignity? Roth's goal is not to tell us what to think, but to give us a new framework for how to think - balancing the rights of people to pursue their individual and mutual goals with the need to protect society's most vulnerable members from harms that might arise from markets, including black markets, growing without boundaries.This is about trade-offs, not moral absolutes. Combining Roth's expertise in market design with his skill in making complicated ideas accessible, You Can't Do That examines how to make those trade-offs in the most humane, beneficial, and efficient ways.

This book shows how our lives are shaped not only by the choices we make, but by the choices we have.From dating, school and university applications to the job market, understand the most important decisions you’ll ever make with insights from a Nobel Prize-winner.Who Gets What and Why is a piquantly written, mind-expanding exploration of the markets that matter most to many of us. If you’ve ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to university or guided your child into a good school, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you have participated in a matching market. They are everywhere around us and account for some of the biggest technological successes of the decade, like Uber and Airbnb. Matching markets can even be the gatekeeper of life itself, guiding how desperately ill patients receive scarce organs for transplants.Alvin E. Roth shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering research into market design – the principles that govern all kinds of markets where money isn’t the only factor in determining who gets what. His book reveals what factors make these markets work well – or badly – and shows us all how to recognise a good match and make smarter, more confident decisions.