Market Design Economists win Nobel Prize

This makes me so happy. Well deserved recipients. Now Tirole just needs to get his prize for his work on platforms and 2-sided markets and I will be fully satisfied.

I referenced Al Roth's work on market design in the following comment in a thread on pricing experiments about 2 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4371892), where I also note that Al Roth "is perhaps the most influential market design economist to date." Thanks to the Nobel committee for affirming this for me. :)

My favorite piece by Roth is an article he wrote in 2002 titled "The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economists"[1] where he describes a methodology that has clearly been the influence of much of his work on the intersection of economics and computer science in the last decade.

[1] http://kuznets.harvard.edu/~aroth/papers/engineer.pdf

His Ph.D is in operations research. Also a blogger http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/

An article on market design for kids choosing schools http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0809/opinions-harvard-alvi...

Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/papers/Repugnance.pdf

Al Roth is basically a computer scientist masquerading as an economist (or the other way around?) -- he does a lot of work on stable matching algorithms, including involvement in designing the medical residency match, kidney-donation match centers, and Boston public school assignments. If you haven't heard of him, you should definitely read a profile.

Shapley also won--I don't know much about him, but I'm sure his theoretical contributions are the underpinning for all later work in the area, he's a giant of the field, etc. etc. etc.