In connection with Bob Wilson's 2017 CME Group-MSRI prize, here's a short (2 minute)video in which Roger Myerson, Phil Reny, Bob Wilson, David Eisenbud, and I respond to the question "What is game theory?" (Phil also remarks on what role it has played in his long happy marriage...)
Subtitle: Al Roth is the current president of the American Economic Association and the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He sat down with the AEA to talk about the market for a product (human kidneys) that can't legally be bought or sold, and the potential for huge savings in the U.S. health care system if we do a better job facilitating kidney exchanges across international borders.
This short (5 min) video is the first in a series From Research To Reward by the National Academy of Sciences about the human side of the benefits from science. It mostly follows a married, incompatible pair through their kidney exchange transplants, as part of a chain organized by the Alliance for Paired Donation (APD). The Matchmaker: An Economist Tackles Kidney Exchange from The National Academies on Vimeo.
"When Fielding Daniel and his wife Amy discovered that it would take five years for him to to be matched with a kidney donor, they were devastated. They launched a desperate search for a life-saving solution that led them to an unexpected savior - a market economist [then] at Harvard University.
xx "This short film is the first in the series From Research To Reward which examines the impact of social science research on our lives. It was created by Redglass Pictures for The National Academy of Sciences. "A film by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason Director of Photography Jon Kasbe Music by Ryan Sayward Whittier Motion Graphics by Kathleen Chee Special thanks to: Dr. Alvin Roth. Amy and Fielding Daniel, Nobel Media, Dr. Michael Rees"
The video has an animated artist's impression of the 2004 paper "Kidney Exchange" by Roth, Sonmez and Unver in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
It also has a shout out to Susan Rees, the transplant coordinator at the APD. I've written before about the importance of the nurses and social workers who act as transplant coordinators.
The chain in which the Daniels participated was featured on the front page of the December 25, 2011 issue of Parade magazine and was started by non-directed donor Deb Shearer.
For kidney exchange history buffs, here's my 2009 post about of the first, pioneering non-simultaneous kidney exchange chain, organized by Dr Mike Rees, who founded the APD: the original paper is here, in the NEJM: Rees, Michael A., Jonathan E. Kopke, Ronald P. Pelletier, Dorry L. Segev, Matthew E. Rutter, Alfredo J. Fabrega, Jeffrey Rogers, Oleh G. Pankewycz, Janet Hiller, Alvin E. Roth, Tuomas Sandholm, Utku Ünver, and Robert A. Montgomery, “A Non-Simultaneous Extended Altruistic Donor Chain,” New England Journal of Medicine, 360;11, March 12, 2009
Here's the video of a short (20 minute) talk I gave at the U Chicago's Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group conference on Market Design Perspectives on Inequality: Crossing borders in search of health, welfare, and safety . (My slides, which are hard to see in the video, are here.)
I speak mostly about Global kidney exchange, and then briefly about surrogacy and refugee resettlement.
This summer the "methods lectures" at the NBER summer institute were on market design. Videos of the five lectures (each about 45 minutes long) are here.
Summer Institute 2016 Methods Lectures
July 26, 2015 Lecturers: Al Roth, Parag Pathak, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi
And you can see a short introductory video in which I am interviewed about market design here (and for the time being on the NBER home page, http://nber.org/).
Here's a short (4 minute) teaching video put together by the CORE Project ("Teaching Economics as if the last three decades had happened") from a much longer videotaped discussion on market design, matching markets, kidney exchange and repugnant transactions.
Here's a link to a CORE class that uses this video:
Here's a video of the plenary talks/announcements at the White House Organ Summit yesterday. I give the last brief talk, from minute 43-48. (5 minute talks are hard:). I report on the plan to start some nondirected donor kidney exchange chains with deceased donor kidneys at Walter Reed, which has some flexibility in the allocation of deceased donor kidneys.
Here's the text of my five-minute speech (which I wrote out in advance, to stay on script and keep on time):
"White House
Organ Summit: Deceased Donor Chains
I’m Al Roth,
an economist at Stanford.
Most people
waiting for transplants are waiting for kidneys. And kidneys are special,
because healthy people have two and can remain healthy with one. So kidneys can
be donated by living as well as deceased donors. Each year in the U.S. we transplant over
5,000 living donor kidneys, along with over 11,000 deceased donor kidneys.
Kidney transplantation is also special: it is both
the best treatment for kidney failure, giving recipients many more years of
life—and it is also the cheapest treatment. The American health care system
saves over $250,000 in five years after a transplant, because dialysis is much
more expensive than transplantation and post-transplant care.
I’m going to tell you now about how
some living donor kidney transplants are organized, as background for one of
the quite concrete announcements we have today.
Sometimes a
person is healthy enough to donate a kidney but can’t give to the patient he
loves, because kidneys have to be biologically compatible. This opens up the
possibility of kidney exchange (and exchange is where economists come in).
Kidney exchange is a kind of matching market in which
patient-donor pairs can donate compatible kidneys to one another so that each
patient gets a compatible kidney. For example, if you and I are healthy enough
to donate a kidney, but can’t donate to the patient we love, maybe my kidney is
compatible with your patient and yours with mine, and so a simple exchange
between two patient-donor pairs can make two additional transplants possible.
In the last 10-15 years, kidney exchange has become a standard part of American
medicine, resulting in thousands of additional transplants.
Sometimes a non-directed donor comes
forward—an altruistic donor who wishes to donate a kidney, and doesn’t have a
particular patient in mind. These donors can spark chains of transplants that
help patient-donor pairs in the kidney exchange pool, and patients on the deceased
donor waiting list who don’t have a living donor. Some of these chains can
produce many transplants, ever since we have learned to organize them as Non-simultaneous
chains, in which the non-directed donor initiates a chain by giving to a
patient-donor pair whose donor then gives to another pair, etc., most often
ending with a donation to someone on the waiting list who doesn’t have a living
donor. These chains can be long because
they don’t have to be conducted simultaneously since every pair receives a
kidney before giving one, so that they don’t risk giving a kidney and not
getting one. Mike Rees who is here today
organized the first non-simultaneous chain, which had twenty people--ten donors
and ten transplant recipients--in the picture that was eventually published in
People Magazine.
The average
non-directed chain produces five transplants. That is, if someone offers to
donate a kidney to start a chain - someone offering to help a stranger with
this amazing gift of a kidney and a life free from dialysis - then on average,
that one donor's gift will start a chain which produces 5 transplants
With that in
mind, earlier this year, several eminent surgeons and I published an article in
the American Journal of Transplantation noting that deceased donor kidneys are
almost all non-directed. So we proposed that we should occasionally start non-directed
donor chains with deceased donor kidneys – which are non-directed donor kidneys
that today are used to produce just a single transplant. Carefully done, this
could substantially increase the number of transplants for all patients –both
those waiting without a living donor and those waiting for a kidney exchange.
Today,
surgeons at Walter Reed who are here today have announced that they are going
to pilot this idea through the military share program, which gives
them the flexibility to allocate certain deceased donor kidneys to the benefit
of veterans and service members. This new initiative at Walter Reed may soon
show us how to move forward on a larger scale in using some deceased donor
organs to start chains of multiple transplants.
To
summarize, kidney chains can play an important role in increasing transplants.
Since the first long non-simultaneous non-directed donor chain was organized by
Dr Rees in 2007, thousands of kidney exchange transplants have been
accomplished, more than half through non-directed donor chains. These save both
lives and money by increasing the number of transplants. So we should take good
care of our non-directed living donors—and there is growing consensus that we
should at least figure out ways to reimburse all donors for their financial costs,
including lost wages. And we should, in gratitude to our deceased donors, make
the best use possible of their non-directed donation.
I’d like to
personally thank Walter Reed for their initiative in pioneering the use of
deceased donor kidneys to start kidney exchange chains that will increase
donations and benefit both those waiting for deceased donors and those waiting
for exchange with other patient donor pairs. Starting kidney transplant chains
with deceased donor kidneys has the potential to be a very significant
innovation."
****************
Here's a link to my post on our AJT article (by Melcher, Roberts, Leichtman, Roth, and Rees) advocating for starting kidney exchange chains with deceased donor kidneys:
"BETHESDA, Md., June 13, 2016 — Walter Reed National Military Medical Center officials today announced a pilot program to pioneer kidney paired donation chains started via the military share program, in which families of active duty military service members donate one of their kidneys to patients listed for transplant at the medical center’s campus here.
...
""We are excited to participate in this initiative, which has the potential to increase organ allocation for our patients,” Navy Capt. (Dr.) Eric Elster, professor and chairman of surgery at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center said. “While it will require overcoming logistical barriers, we in military medicine excel at such challenges."
Walter Reed surgeons perform an average of 25 transplants per year on patients from across the country, and the medical center also maintains a living donor kidney transplant program that participates in national paired kidney exchanges.
Army Maj. (Dr.) Jason Hawksworth, transplant chief at Walter Reed, said his team “looks forward to contributing to the innovative initiative that may exponentially increase the availability of life-saving transplants on patients throughout the nation."
According to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, a regulatory body that tracks transplants, Walter Reed has the best organ transplant outcomes in the greater Washington-Baltimore region."
Our communications folk were out in full force for Al Roth’s lecture on Wednesday and have already posted some nice photos from the event and uploaded a video of the lecture to YouTube. "
Here's a video of a public lecture followed by a discussion (about half an hour each) about my book Who Gets What and Why, which just came out in German. The location of the lecture was once an East German government building where the head of state had his office, and is now a business school, the European School for Management and Technology. I was introduced by Gerhard Caspar, the head of the American Academy in Berlin and former president of Stanford. (My talk begins about minute 11:30 of the video, the discussion begins about minute 41, with Christoph von Marschall, Managing Editor of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, which touches on market designers in Germany, the legal barriers to kidney exchange there, and refugee resettlement.)
Here (and below) is the video of the public lecture I gave in October, and an accompanying interview, as part of the Centennial celebration at the University of Illinois College of Business, where I had my first academic job in 1974.
Here's 4 minutes (edited and patched together) of snippets from an event at the Rotman School at the University of Toronto, where I spoke about my book Who Gets What and Why, and was interviewed by Joshua Gans, who suggests that market designers might be more arrogant even than other economists. (This snippet also captures me talking about my friend and collaborator Elliott Peranson, whose firm National Matching Services is headquartered in Toronto...and about the Iron Law of Marriage:)
Someone at Stanford thought it would be funny to make very short videos of Stanford faculty members saying something non-traditional about football, in the run-up to the Rose Bowl. (I think Hank Greely No 2, who also talks about market design of sorts, is the winner, but maybe I'm the runner-up:)
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