Alvin Roth

There are resources that have to be allocated.

A given kindergarten class can only hold so many students.

But deciding who gets what, who gets into which kindergarten class is a market exercise because markets are the human institutions, the human artifacts that try to aggregate private information and turn it into collective action.

And so that's where I would come out as saying what markets are there.

They're pervasive.

They're ancient.

You know, human beings have been transacting with each other for a long time.

And marketplaces and markets are the tools we've built to coordinate and compete and cooperate with each other.

A corporation is not necessarily a market.

It can be a hierarchy.

An army is not a market.

There are lots of things that are in markets.

No.

Families exchange goods.

But they don't do it in a market way.

They –

The relationship is so – among other things, markets allow people who don't know each other to engage with each other, even though they may be engaging in making a match.

But when I think about families, the thing about a family is genetics and lifelong relationships.

I'm not sure.

I mean, he certainly talks about information, you know, about having – I mean, the phrase which he hardly ever used but which he's famous for is the invisible hand.