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Roth, Alvin

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Alvin

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Roth, Alvin
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.e4668195-eb9d-4313-bce4-d6528e165ca6

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    Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation
    (MDPI AG, 2013-06-19) Niederle, Muriel; Roth, Alvin; Ünver, M
    Markets sometimes unravel, with offers becoming inefficiently early. Often this is attributed to competition arising from an imbalance of demand and supply, typically excess demand for workers. However this presents a puzzle, since unraveling can only occur when firms are willing to make early offers and workers are willing to accept them. We present a model and experiment in which workers’ quality becomes known only in the late part of the market. However, in equilibrium, matching can occur (inefficiently) early only when there is comparable demand and supply: a surplus of applicants, but a shortage of high quality applicants.
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    New Challenges in Multihospital Kidney Exchange
    (American Economic Association, 2012-05) Ashlagi, Itai; Roth, Alvin
    The growth of kidney exchange presents new challenges for the design of kidney exchange clearinghouses. The players now include directors of transplant centers, who see sets of patient-donor pairs, and can choose to reveal only difficult-to-match pairs to the clearinghouse, while withholding easy-to-match pairs to transplant locally. This reduces the number of transplants. We discuss how the incentives for hospitals to enroll all pairs in kidney exchange can be achieved, and how the concentration of hard to match pairs increases the importance of long, non-simultaneous nondirected donor chains.
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    Marketplace Institutions Related to the Timing of Transactions: Reply to Priest (2010)
    (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Roth, Alvin
    This note describes the unraveling of transaction dates in several markets, including the labor markets for new lawyers hired by large law firms and for gastroenterology fellows, and the market for post-season college football bowls. Together these will illustrate that unraveling can occur in markets with competitive prices, that it can result in substantial inefficiencies, and that marketplace institutions play a role in restoring efficiency. (All of these contradict the conclusions of Priest, 2010). I’ll conclude with open questions about the role of marketplace institutions and the timing of transactions.
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    Nonsimultaneous Chains and Dominos in Kidney-Paired Donation-Revisited
    (Wiley, 2011-04-26) Ashlagi, I; Gilchrist, Duncan; Rees, M; Roth, Alvin
    Since 2008, kidney exchange in America has grown in part from the incorporation of nondirected donors in transplant chains rather than simple exchanges. It is controversial whether these chains should be performed simultaneously ‘domino‐paired donation’, (DPD) or nonsimultaneously ‘nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donor, chains (NEAD). NEAD chains create ‘bridge donors’ whose incompatible recipients receive kidneys before the bridge donor donates, and so risk reneging by bridge donors, but offer the opportunity to create more transplants by overcoming logistical barriers inherent in simultaneous chains. Gentry et al. simulated whether DPD or NEAD chains would produce more transplants when chain segment length was limited to three transplants, and reported that DPD performed at least as well as NEAD chains. As this finding contrasts with the experience of several groups involved in kidney‐paired donation, we performed simulations that allowed for longer chain segments and used actual patient data from the Alliance for Paired Donation. When chain segments of 4–6 transplants are allowed in the simulations, NEAD chains produce more transplants than DPD. Our simulations showed not only more transplants as chain length increased, but also that NEAD chains produced more transplants for highly sensitized and blood type O recipients.
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    More Money, More Problems? Can High Pay be Coercive and Repugnant?
    (American Economic Association, 2015) Ambuehl, Sandro; Niederle, Muriel; Roth, Alvin
    IRBs can disallow high incentives they deem coercive. A vignette study on MTurk concerning participation in medical trials shows that a substantial minority of subjects concurs. They think high incentives cause more regret, and that more people would be better off without the opportunity to participate. We model observers as judging the ethicality of incentives by partially using their own utility. The model predicts that payments are repugnant only to the extent that they affect the participation decision, and more so for larger transactions. Incentivizing poorer participants is more repugnant, and in-kind incentives are less repugnant than monetary incentives.
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    Free riding and participation in large scale, multi-hospital kidney exchange
    (The Econometric Society, 2014) Ashlagi, Itai; Roth, Alvin
    As multi-hospital kidney exchange has grown, the set of players has grown from patients and surgeons to include hospitals. Hospitals can choose to enroll only their hard-to-match patient–donor pairs, while conducting easily arranged exchanges internally. This behavior has already been observed. We show that as the population of hospitals and patients grows, the cost of making it individually rational for hospitals to participate fully becomes low in almost every large exchange pool (although the worst-case cost is very high), while the cost of failing to guarantee individual rationality is high—in lost transplants. We identify a mechanism that gives hospitals incentives to reveal all patient–donor pairs. We observe that if such a mechanism were to be implemented and hospitals enrolled all their pairs, the resulting patient pools would allow efficient matchings that could be implemented with two- and three-way exchanges.
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    Maximization, learning, and economic behavior
    (National Academy of Sciences, 2014) Erev, I.; Roth, Alvin
    The rationality assumption that underlies mainstream economic theory has proved to be a useful approximation, despite the fact that systematic violations to its predictions can be found. That is, the assumption of rational behavior is useful in understanding the ways in which many successful economic institutions function, although it is also true that actual human behavior falls systematically short of perfect rationality. We consider a possible explanation of this apparent inconsistency, suggesting that mechanisms that rest on the rationality assumption are likely to be successful when they create an environment in which the behavior they try to facilitate leads to the best payoff for all agents on average, and most of the time. Review of basic learning research suggests that, under these conditions, people quickly learn to maximize expected return. This review also shows that there are many situations in which experience does not increase maximization. In many cases, experience leads people to underweight rare events. In addition, the current paper suggests that it is convenient to distinguish between two behavioral approaches to improve economic analyses. The first, and more conventional approach among behavioral economists and psychologists interested in judgment and decision making, highlights violations of the rational model and proposes descriptive models that capture these violations. The second approach studies human learning to clarify the conditions under which people quickly learn to maximize expected return. The current review highlights one set of conditions of this type and shows how the understanding of these conditions can facilitate market design.
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    Getting More Organs for Transplantation
    (American Economic Association, 2014) Kessler, Judd B.; Roth, Alvin
    Organs for transplantation are a scarce resource. Paying to increase the supply of organs is illegal in much of the world. We review efforts to increase transplantation by increasing the supply of available organs from living and deceased donors. Progress has been made in increasing the availability of living donor kidneys through kidney exchange. Recent legislation in Israel aims at encouraging deceased donation by awarding priority for receiving organs to registered donors. We also explore the manner in which organ donation is solicited and present evidence to suggest that some recent movement towards "mandated choice" may be counterproductive.
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    Matching with Couples: Stability and Incentives in Large Markets*
    (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2013) Kojima, Fuhito; Pathak, Parag; Roth, Alvin
    Accommodating couples has been a longstanding issue in the design of centralized labor market clearinghouses for doctors and psychologists, because couples view pairs of jobs as complements. A stable matching may not exist when couples are present. We find conditions under which a stable matching exists with high probability in large markets. We present a mechanism that finds a stable matching with high probability, and which makes truth-telling by all participants an approximate equilibrium. We relate these theoretical results to the job market for psychologists, in which stable matchings exist for all years of the data, despite the presence of couples.