Who gets what--and why
"A Nobel laureate reveals the often surprising rules that govern a vast array of activities -- both mundane and life-changing -- in which money may play little or no role. If you've ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you've participated in a kind of market. Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of "goods," like a spot in the Yale freshman class or a position at Google? This is the territory of matching markets, where "sellers" and "buyers" must choose each other, and price isn't the only factor determining who gets what. Alvin E. Roth is one of the world's leading experts on matching markets. He has even designed several of them, including the exchange that places medical students in residencies and the system that increases the number of kidney transplants by better matching donors to patients. In Who Gets What -- And Why, Roth reveals the matching markets hidden around us and shows how to recognize a good match and make smarter, more confident decisions"
Stats for nerds
6recommend
10mentions
6people
2016–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The game theorists/economists have studied this stuff in depth under the rubric of "mechanism design" or "market design". The relevant concept is "incentive compatibility" where the agents in the system do the right thing (whatever that was intended to be/designed for) because any deviation from that costs them more than playing nice.
The Wikipedia article [0] is not yet great but does give the two classic examples of "second-price auctions and a simple majority vote between two choices". The Gibbard–Satterthwaite shows the difficulty in extending this to more choices (in that Arrow's theorem sort of way).
The best thing I've read on this stuff is Alvin Roth's "Who Gets What and Why" (2015) [1] which is worth a read in any case. Repugnant markets!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_E._Roth#Market_design
- I can see why some things landed here. Medicine is expensive. Desperate people are more susceptible to fraud. Yet things are improving: someone like me would be long dead a generation ago.
We should look at these challenges holistically and think about better fiscal/social engineering of our marketplaces. Alvin Roth's book, "Who Gets What and Why", is a good introduction to identifying market failures and thinking about how to address them.
- Nothing that this article discusses is particularly noteworthy or novel - Literally chapter 7 of the most common Econ 101 book (Paul Krugman's) covers "Imperfect Competition" in much better, less circular detail.
However, the mental gymnastics the author performs to reach these conclusions is impressive on its own right. "You are not buying an apple, but the property rights to an apple" is just the sort of non-parody content I have come to expect from Substack writers at this point.
If you are actually interested in how supply and demand work in non-monetary markets (like the POW camp example), I cannot recommend enough "Who Gets What and Why" by Alvin Roth, the father of Kidney exchange programs.
- Whoa, I’ve never come across Mechanism Design specifically, though I did dabble in some research (and application in pharmaceutical R&D software) of market/auction design. I found that stuff to be profoundly useful, so I’ll definitely dive into mechanism design.
Have you found any particularly good resources/books on this?
FWIW I loved Alvin Roth’s “Who gets what and why” which is about market design mostly.
- You should actually read up on some of the work of some of these prize winning economists - lots of them actually have very insightful and useful contributions to society.
I cannot recommend enough the book "Who Gets What and Why" by Alvin Roth, a former Nobel Prize winner. Among other things, he created the world's first successful Kidney exchange program for donors. The book eloquently lays out how to design functional markets of exchange when money is not a resource available.
His work is easy to understand, eloquent, and literally saves lives. This is exactly the kind of thing worth celebrating.
- Wow. I am really stunned by this list. I took a look expecting the usual chorus of contrarian populist hardbacks, but this list is very conclusive and and covers a wide range of opinions and subjects. I have read about a quarter of them and can attest they are all excellent (although with varying degree of readability). This is the exact sort of list if you want to see multiple perspectives and challenge yourself.
I also want to shout out to Hidden Order, which I was really surprised to see here, but is really quite the gem. More than any other econ book, I have pulled off the shelf and gone through the much dog-eared pages. It does an amazing job of taking off-the-shelf economic ideas and framing them in such excellently written parables or examples. Disagree or whatever, but it's an excellent and often trite way to understand classic principles.
A couple books I would add to the list:
Why Nations Fail
Red Plenty
Who Gets What and Why
