Honorary 7th dan black belt in JKA Shotokan karate, presented by Sensei Masataka Mori

When I was an undergraduate at Columbia University, from the Fall of 1968 through the summer of 1971, I spent a lot of time practicing Shotokan karate, which was very satisfying and which taught me that I could work harder than I had thought. Our instructor was the now legendary Sensei Masataka Mori, who came to New York in 1968, where he founded the NY Dojo, and also taught at Columbia.

It turns out that Nobel prizes are followed by other recognitions, and the most unexpected of those that I have received is that the Japan Karate Association in Tokyo has made me an honorary 7^th-degree black belt, something that, given my athletic abilities, is even more unimaginable than being a Nobel laureate.

Sensei Mori came out to San Francisco earlier this year to make the presentation:  in the photo below, he and I are holding the certificate.

Next to me is my wife Emilie, and next to Sensei Mori is T.J. Stiles, the Pulitzer Prize/National Book Award winning biographer of Cornelius Vanderbilt (and Jesse James, too, but in a different book, it turns out that they weren't the same person:).  T.J. is a 5th dan black belt and the chief instructor of the JKA San Francisco dojo.

Behind the camera was Dr. Jacob Levitt, a 4th dan black belt who made the trip with Sensei Mori from New York, where he teaches and practices dermatology at Mt. Sinai Hospital.

Emilie and I felt that we were in the company of three unusually accomplished people.

Here is what I gather is an approximate English translation of the Japanese certificate:

UCLA honors Lloyd Shapley, but closes CASSEL

On Thursday I gave a department seminar at UCLA's department of Economics, and was glad to see this poster of Lloyd Shapley around campus, and a display in his honor in the library.

Lloyd Shapley

In the same visit, I was sorry to hear that UCLA's big experimental economics lab CASSEL, the California Social Science Experimental Laboratory, is scheduled to be closed down...:(

Nobel Museum display

Olof Somell writes to me from the Nobel Museum in Stockholm:

Dear Professor Roth, 

I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for your donation of artifacts to our collections. We at the Nobel Museum now showcase your "Mr. Matching t-shirt" in a display with artifacts donated by last years Nobel laureates. I attach a few photos from the display (apologies for the somewhat poor resolution). Also in the display you see for instance a piece of art from the European Union, a book collection from Mo Yen and pipettes from Shinya Yamanaka. 

Best regards

Olof Somell

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Olof Somell

Subject specialist, economics

The Nobel Museum
Box 2245
SE-103 16 Stockholm
Sweden

In earlier correspondence, soliciting an artifact, he wrote to me describing some previous contributions (email of Friday Nov 2 2012):

"To illustrate: two years ago Professor Diamond presented us with a baseball shirt custom made by his graduate students, citing his long-time devotion to the Red Sox and the link between calculating batting averages as a child and his later interest in statistics and economics. Last year Professor Sargent presented us with a Hard times token given to him by his grandfather: an object that sparked his interest in economics. "

If I recall correctly, I gave them two T-shirts given to me by my students and postdocs at a surprise 50th birthday party, the one shown (which is a picture of me over the caption "Mr Matching") and one showing pictures of all of them...

American Math Monthly reprints Gale and Shapley 1962

The journal is available on jstor and to members, but here is some of the front material. The paper itself is well worth reading, and I've posted a link to an un-gated version below.


THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL MONTHLY VOLUME 120, NO. 5 MAY 2013
A Letter from the Editor 383
Scott Chapman

"...This month, we honor the Nobel Prize-winning accomplishments of Lloyd Shapley. Shapley’s 1962 MONTHLY paper “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage,” co-authored with David Gale, is well-known to long-time MONTHLY readers. According to Google Scholar, the Gale/Shapley paper has been referenced over 2500 times (among MONTHLY articles, only Li and Yorke’s 1975 paper “Period three implies chaos” has been referenced more). Hence, when the announcement was made late last year that Shapley and Alvin E. Roth had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design,” it
was not a surprise that the 1962 MONTHLY paper was cited by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. I did find it surprising that many of the younger members of the MONTHLY Editorial Board were completely unaware of this paper. Vadim Ponomarenko wrote me the following: “The article is not only short and ground breaking, but really well-written and interesting. I think the MONTHLY should republish this article in its entirety.” Thus was born the idea to honor Shapley by reprinting his article.
I thank Ehud Kalai, a long-time colleague of Shapley’s and the James J. O’Connor Professor of Decision and Game Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, for offering to write a Foreword to Gale and Shapley’s work.
I believe that his Foreword speaks for itself, but add that the MONTHLY Editorial Board sees the reprinting of Gale and Shapley’s paper as a special opportunity to open this classic piece to a new generation of mathematicians."



Foreword: The High Priest of Game Theory 384
Ehud Kalai

"In “Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory” [1] Robert Leonard describes a 1948 public lecture presented by John von Neumann at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. The lecture was interrupted by a young voice from the back protesting “No! No!, that can be done much more simply!” According to Hans Speier, a director at RAND, you could have heard a pin drop as von Neumann said “come up here, young man. Show me.” The young man goes up, takes the piece of chalk, and writes down another derivation as von Neumann interrupts and says
“not so fast, young man. I can’t follow.” The young protestor was Lloyd Shapley, and following this incident he was awarded a stipend to study game theory at Princeton, a fortunate occurrence for the future of game theory.
More than a half a century later, the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth. Roth opened his Nobel Prize lecture with the following sentence: “Lloyd, when I began studying game theory your work touched every part of it and shaped it, and you were an inspiration not just for me but for the whole generation of game theorists that followed you. . . .” Robert Aumann, the 2005 Nobel Laureate game theorist who often introduced Shapley as the “High Priest of Game Theory,” stated in his Nobel Prize Lecture that Lloyd Shapley is the “greatest game theorist of all times.”...

College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage 386
D. Gale and L. S. Shapley

Read it or re-read it...it's a great paper. Here's an ungated version.

Columbia Engineering (my alma mater) interview

Here's the interview, called The ultimate matchmaker.

Stanford's endowment: I benefit directly from parts of it

An unusual thing about American universities is that they are largely financed by philanthropy. The oldest universities tend to have very big endowments. Some of those endowments yield income for general revenues, while others have very specific purposes.

Here's an article from the Stanford Benefactor about some of the endowments that have helped me personally settle in to my new job at Stanford: How to Bring a Nobel Laureate to Stanford

Pictures with President Obama

Before the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, the five 2012 American Nobel laureates were invited to meet with President Obama in the Oval Office.  These pictures arrived in the mail not long ago.

Handshake: Lloyd Shapley and his son Peter are right behind me.

6 American Nobel laureates and a President

A few thoughts:

The United States does very well in Nobel prizes. It's probably good for us that the prizes are given by Swedish institutions and not American ones.

An American president spends a lot of time with the White House photographer. (You wonder when a newly elected president learns just how much of his time will be spent having his picture taken.)

The pictures each came with a sticker on the back saying that they were not to be disseminated without permission. I asked for and immediately received permission  from the White House Photo Office to post these on my blog (in an email from Rick McKay, 2/21/13).

The American Gastroenterological Association takes note of the Nobel for market design

The redesign of the match for Gastroenterology fellows is one of the projects mentioned in the Nobel documentation on p23), and the AGA takes note of that: Al Roth Wins Nobel Prize and AGA Recognized in Announcement. (Two key names on that project are Debbie Proctor and Muriel Niederle.)

Market design for everyone (from libertarians to socialists)

Organized markets inevitably have rules, which establish the playing field rather than determine outcomes, which is what makes market design different from, say, central planning. (One metaphor I like is that a free market is like a wheel that can rotate freely because it has an axle and well-oiled bearings...another is that boxing became a sport rather than a brawl, safe enough to play, only after the rules endorsed by the Marquess of Queensbury were adopted to cut down on deaths in the ring...)

It turns out that market design can be liked by everyone from socialists to libertarians.

Here's Friedrich Hayek anticipating the subject, in The Road to Serfdom:

“There is … all the difference between deliberately creating a system within which competition will work as beneficially as possible and passively accepting institutions as they are. Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.”
 …
“The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.”

both quotes are from p71 of this edition, which you can search
*********

And here's the Socialist Party of Great Britain (on the occasion of the recent Nobel economics prize for market design):

"As socialism will be a non-market society where the price mechanism won’t apply to anything, the winners’ research will be able to be used for certain purposes even after the end of capitalism...
"No doubt it would continue to be used to allocate organs to transplant patients and students to rooms. In fact, this last could be extended to allocating housing to people living in a particular area. While they may not get their first choice, people would get something for which they had expressed some preference and that corresponded to their needs and circumstances.

Cooking the Books: A Nobel Prize for Non-Economics | The Socialist Party of Great Britain »

Mechanisms of Matching: Stability and Applications (Lars Ehlers in French in Ottawa)

Lars Ehlers will be presenting a talk on Mechanisms of Matching: Stability and Applications, in connection with the 2012 Nobel prize. The announcement is in French...and I'm guessing the talk will also be.  Ehlers is a distinguished matching theorist in any language, so if you are in Ottawa tomorrow...


L’ASSOCIATION DES ÉCONOMISTES QUÉBÉCOIS DE L’OUTAOUAIS, EN COLLABORATION AVEC LE DÉPARTEMENT DE SCIENCE ÉCONOMIQUE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ D’OTTAWA,VOUS INVITE À UN COCKTAIL-CONFÉRENCE AYANT POUR THÈME :


« MÉCANISMES D’APPARIEMENT: STABILITÉ ET APPLICATIONS»
La conférence portera sur la contribution de Alvin Roth et Lloyd Shapley,
Lauréats du Prix Nobel en économie 2012
MARDI LE 22 JANVIER 2013, 17 h 30 à 19 h 30
À L’UNIVERSITÉ D’OTTAWA
120 rue Université, Faculté des sciences sociales (FSS), pièce 4007
Un cocktail et un léger buffet suivront
CONFÉRENCIER
Professeur Lars Ehlers, Département de science économique,
Université de Montréal
PRÉSIDENTE DE SÉANCE
Professeure Vicky Barham, Directrice, Département de science économique,
Université d’Ottawa
PRÉSENTATION ET DISCUSSION: 17H30 À 18H45


Monsieur  Lars Ehlers, professeur titulaire au Département de science économique de l’Université de Montréal, s’intéresse notamment à la manipulation des mécanismes d’appariement sur les marchés du travail et l’allocation d’objets indivisibles.  Il a remporté en 2012 le prestigieux ‘Social Choice and Welfare Prize’ reconnaissant sa contribution exceptionnelle à la théorie du choix social et de l'économie du bien être. Il est aussi membre du conseil d’administration de la ‘Society for Economic Design’, un organisme académique qui s’intéresse précisément au domaine de recherche pour lequel le prix Nobel 2012 a été décerné.  Dans le cadre de la compétition pour les Subventions ordinaires de recherche 2003 du Conseil de recherche en sciences humaines (CRSH), c’est d’ailleurs sa proposition de recherche qui a remporté la première place au Canada. Cette année, il a aussi été élu, et ce pour une durée de cinq ans, au  Council of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare. Ses travaux sur les mécanismes d’appariement ont notamment été publiés dans le Journal of Economic Theory.

Death and privacy (and transplantation and market design)

The latest issue of the AJT Report, a news summary in the American Journal of Transplantation, concerns The Unintended Consequences of Privacy, reporting on a recent decision by the Social Security Administration to decline to share some data about deaths, due to privacy concerns.

Apparently this decision will mean that the Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) will no longer be able to disclose to transplant centers the deaths that occur of patients on the waiting list for deceased donor organs, or after transplantation.

This could turn into a big problem, unless it is resolved soon, because information about deaths is critical for managing the transplant system at all levels.

"According to Patricia W. Potrzebowski, PhD, executive director of the National Association of Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS), “SSA never had the authority
to release state death records through the public DMF. This is because state records are governed by state statutes and regulations. State statutes and regulations vary as to who may access death record information. In some states, death record information is publicly available; in others, even the fact of death is held in strict confidence.”
***********

It is becoming increasingly clear that privacy is a big issue in market design in general. The AJT report coincidentally juxtaposes the two issues by including some Nobel news at the end of the report.

Robert Aumann on Shapley and Roth and matching and market design

Bob Aumann writes in the February 2013 Notices of the American Mathematical Society (in a column hosted by Elaine Kehoe): Shapley and Roth Awarded Nobel Prize in Economics

After summarizing Shapley's work, Aumann (who shared the 2005 Nobel Economics prize) concludes "On each of these counts, Shapley has done more than all the previous game theory Nobelists, even when taken together."

I should add that I find myself moved to be saluted by Aumann in the same article (and not just because he praises me too extravagantly:). When I was a young game theorist in the 1970's, Bob Aumann and Bob Wilson were for me the welcoming faces of game theory, and I resolved, if I thrived, to try to be as supportive of young people as they were. I hope I've succeeded in that too.

Not every new discipline has the welcoming, community-of-scholars culture that game theory enjoyed in those days. I hope that market design continues to thrive in this way (as well as being a team sport).

My guess from my limited personal experience is that the "culture" of a discipline is particularly important when it is still new...that might be something for historians and sociologists of science to look into.

Roberto Serrano on Lloyd Shapley

I had the unexpected pleasure of running into Roberto Serrano and Vince Crawford in Stockholm, where they were guests of the Nobel Foundation.

 Now here is a forthcoming paper by Roberto, on Lloyd Shapley's contributions:

R. Serrano, “Lloyd Shapley’s Matching and Game Theory,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics, forthcoming.

More photography business in Stockholm

My recent trip to Sweden made me of interest to a variety of professional photographers, and in turn gave me a glimpse into the ways they earn their livings. Here's the website of the Swedish photographer Otto Westerlundh. If you scroll down his web page you can get some idea of the wide variety of pictures he shoots. He took some pics of me at a reception in Stockholm.

Speaking of photos, below is one my wife took with her phone, at the rehearsal for the Nobel award ceremony. You can see me practice receiving the award from a stand-in for the Swedish king. You can also pick out the Californians from among the laureates: my Stanford colleague Brian Kobilka is the other fellow in jeans...(The same photo, more or less, later in the day at the actual ceremony is here.)

Video of Nobel prize awards ceremony

I'm almost recovered from my trip to Stockholm:) Here is the video of the Nobel presentation ceremonies. Economics starts around 1:12. with intro in Swedish by Thorsten Persson, and 1:16 in English
http://www.svtplay.se/video/892980/prisutdelningen-i-konserhuset

And here are the iconic pictures from the Nobel website:

Update: the Nobel Foundation website now has short video clips of both me and Lloyd receiving our prizes:
Alvin Roth receives his prize
Lloyd Shapley receives his prize

Martin Shubik

The celebration of Lloyd Shapley at the recent Nobel week naturally makes people think of his long term collaborator Martin Shubik. There's a nice discussion of his work by the archivists at the Duke University libraries, which houses his papers: The Martin Shubik Papers: From Early Game Theory to the Strategic Analysis of War

"While Shubik was born in New York City in 1926, he received his early education in England. After moving to Canada, he graduated with a B.A. in mathematics and subsequently with an M.A. in political economy from the University of Toronto in 1947. Equipped with this background, Shubik arrived at Princeton University in 1949, where the archival record begins. He received a Ph.D. in economics in 1953 under the supervision of Oskar Morgenstern, one of the founding fathers of game theory. The influence of his supervisor becomes apparent in Shubik’s collection, not only through the class notes Shubik took of Morgenstern’s lectures and in the correspondence with him throughout the years, but also indirectly through Shubik’s life-long contributions to game theory and its application to economic problems. And, like Morgenstern, Shubik frequently voiced a critical attitude towards purely theoretical work.

"Shubik’s collection is a treasure-house of primary resources on economics, especially for researchers interested in the early years of game theory. Shubik was part of an inspiring group of students during his stay at Princeton, including Harold Kuhn, John McCarthy, John Milnor, John Nash (Nobel Prize, 1994), Norman Shapiro, and Lloyd Shapley (Nobel Prize, 2012), who were pioneers in the field of game theory and would continue to shape the history of American mathematical economics during the second half of the 20th century. Innumerable drafts of Shubik’s collaborative works, often accompanied by correspondence and research notes by his co-authors, afford an inspiring set of resources evoking that historical period. The collection contains Shubik’s and Shapley’s drafts and notes on their joint works on game theory, from their early papers in the 1950s to their collaboration during the 1970s at the RAND corporation. The collection also allows for personal glimpses into Shubik’s life. For example, Shubik’s life-long friendship and professional collaboration with Shapley is reflected in the extensive correspondence throughout their academic careers. Similarly, Shubik’s exchanges with Nash (sometimes through humorous cards and joke letters) offer a unique source for historians interested in the early years of game theory and the history of modern economics."

Market design is a team sport

Muriel Niederle has been posting some pictures from Stockholm, and here are some of mine...

First, the final slide from my Nobel lecture:

It turns out that parts of the teams for kidney exchange, school choice and medical matches made it to Stockholm, and those folks look a little different in tails and gowns:

School choice: Parag Pathak, Al Roth, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Neil Dorosin

Medical matches: Elliott Peranson, Al Roth, Muriel Niederle

Kidney Exchange: Frank Delmonico, Al Roth, Mike Rees, Itai Ashlagi

David Warsh on Lloyd Shapley and his colleagues

After a head feint towards another topic, David Warsh writes about Lloyd Shapley and his colleagues David Gale, Herb Scarf, and Martin Shubik.

"The book I yearn to read some day is a deep examination about the way that psychology and strategic behavior came to economics in the twentieth century, in the guise of game theory. So far its leading characters pop up as individuals, either the subjects of biographies (John von Neumann in books by Steve Heims  and Norman Macrae) or recipients of Nobel Prizes – John Nash eighteen years ago (not long thereafter the subject of Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind), and now Lloyd Shapley. If you had gotten up early yesterday morning, you could have seen, streaming live from Stockholm, via the Internet, the 89-year-old Shapley, an old man grasping a sheaf of notes, attempting to deliver a stripped-down talk about one aspect of his work, intermittently puzzled and confident, until a wave of applause relieved him of the need to persevere.

Against long odds, Shapley won the game that senior players sometimes call “Beat the Reaper.” Considering that he and Nash met as young men in the extraordinary hothouse that was the Princeton University Department of Mathematics in the days soon after World War II he is fortunate indeed. In a setting dominated by the polymath von Neumann, he and Nash quickly shouldered aside the founding father and divided up among themselves and their friends the competing programs that game theorists have pursued ever since.

You have to admire the alacrity with which the committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences acted, pairing Shapley, of the University of California at Los Angeles, with the vigorous, young Alvin Roth, who just left Harvard for Stanford University (a stripling at 60.) They did much the same in 1996, with William Vickrey, 82, of Columbia University; and, in 2007, with Leo Hurwicz, 90 of the University of Minnesota, pairing them in each case with much younger men. In Hurwicz’s case they beat the Reaper by less than a year; Vickrey died a few days after learning of his award, his heart burst from the renewed excitement of the chase. "

...

"The problem with the prizes is that they obscure the networks that have led to them, with countless others left out. Characteristically, the last slide of Roth’s lecture yesterday contained the photographs of fifteen or twenty collaborators who helped turn market design into one of the most exciting fields in economics: surgeons, medical administrators, educators, junior colleagues.  Such a slide, had it been prepared to accompany Shapley’s lecture, would have included a very different dozen or two collaborators, beginning with the mathematician’s famous father, the Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, who was a story in his own right, having successfully described in 1918 the size of the Milky Way galaxy and determined our sun’s position in it, only then to fight and lose a lifelong battle with Edwin Hubble about what lay beyond the boundaries of our galactic home (nothing, Shapley said). Three other contemporaries whom the younger Shapley met first atPrinceton, back in the day, would stand out.

There would be David Gale, who died in 2008. at 86, Shapley’s mathematician collaborator on the 1962 paper “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage,” which was the beginning of the skein of work for which this year’s prize was given.  Had he lived a little longer, Gale might well have shared in the award. But there seemed nothing unfulfilled about Gale’s life, which was described inthis excellent article by the University of California at Berkeley (where he taught for forty years), as a passionate father, puzzle-monger, avid skier, tennis player, traveler and jazz aficionado. (He kept an office in the Ecole Polytechnique inParis as well.)

Then there is Herbert Scarf, 82, ofYale University, Shapley’s co-author on a key paper in 1974, “On Cores and Indivisibility.”  Scarf’s contribution to the study of traditional one-sided markets, which is the way the process of kidney exchange is understood, was discussed at some length in the long citation that accompanied the Nobel award. Unexamined, however, was Scarf’s forty-year quest to achieve a satisfying mathematical description of economies in which increasing returns, meaning falling costs, play a prominent role. Such increasing returns, or economies of scale, exist everywhere in the modern world, at least up to a point. Yet a satisfying framework for examining them so far had eluded mathematical economists, including Scarf.  The editor of his collected papers quotes a Chinese poem in this connection: “An old war-horse may be stabled, yet still it longs to gallop a thousand miles; and a noble-hearted man, though advanced in years, never abandons his proud aspirations.”

Finally there is Martin Shubik, 86.  Shubik, too, collaborated with Shapley often over the years; their 1971 paper on the “assignment game” was a key step in the  clear statement of the line of work for which the prize was given. “He was a superb mathematician, and I had a good economic intuition,” Shubik says of Shapley; “together we made a very good mathematical economist.” But Shubik has work of which he is more proud.  His 1959 article, “Edgeworth Market Games,” was the first to relate a truly economic concept (the contract curve) to a game-theoretic concept (the core),according to Eric Gordon, and so formed a bridge which game theorists have been crossing ever since.  By the time he and Shapley stated the connection formally ten years later, in “On Strategic Market Games,” Shubik’s future was assured.  It was Shubik who apparently campaigned successfully for Shapley for this year’s prize."

Gangnam Stanford Style

After dinner speech

After the Nobel banquet, a two minute speech.

Update: here it is on a local file...