Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley win the Nobel prize for economics

Breaking news and massive boost for matching theory:
Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley win the Nobel prize for economics for `for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design'.
See The Guardian's coverage of the news. This is also a good time to honour the contributions of David Gale----the late colleague of Shapley who also made fundamental contributions to the growing work on matching markets.



                           
                                   
Some of the influential publications which have helped Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth achieve the prize are not restricted to but at least include the following ones:

  • Gale, D., L. S. Shapley (1962). College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage. American Mathematical Monthly 69 9-15: The paper which formalized the famous Deferred Acceptance Algorithm
  • Shapley, L. S., and Scarf, H. 1974. On cores and indivisibility. Journal of Mathematical Economics 1(1):23–37: Presented the Top Trading Cycle Mechanism
  • A. Roth and M. Sotomayor, ``Two Sided Matching,'' Econometric Society Monographs18; Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1989: The classic book on two-side matching.
  • A.E. Roth, T. Sonmez and M. Unver (2004) Kidney Exchange. Quarterly Journal of Eco- nomics 119: 457-488: an important paper outlining how matching theory contributes to the practice of kidney exchange.
  • Roth, A. E. 2002. The economist as engineer: Game theory, experimental economics and computation as tools of design economics. Econometrica, 70: 1341–1378. 
Please also see the scientific background for this year's prize.
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BBC has profiled the two prize winners and tried to explain their contributions. However, BBC gets the understanding of (pairwise) stability wrong:
If you are wondering what an "unstable outcome" means, then imagine a situation where two husbands (or for that matter two wives) both wish they had married the other's spouse.
It must be clarified that `unstable outcome ' is when a man and a woman who are not married to each other do want to get married to each other.

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Slate has a much more insightful piece on the contributions of matching theory.

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