Prof. Alvin Roth

Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2012 and is best known for his work on kidney exchange markets. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University.


In The Graduate, a character says to Dustin Hoffman as he is about to finish school and head out into the world, “I want to say one word to you, just one word,” and that one word is “Plastics,” because, he says, “there’s a great future in plastics.” If you were to say “just one word” to a young person thinking about being an economist, what would that word be?

“Computerized-markets.”

[For Roth’s own work on computerized markets, see here, here, here, and here.

For other advice he gives to young economists, here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9SLiRpUNsc

The famous scene from The Graduate can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-G9xVdVs ]