Alvin Roth

speaker

677 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 11 May

Alvin Roth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 353 | Alvin Roth on the Economics of Morally Contested Markets · 11 May 2026 podcast

Today, there are almost 100,000 and many more who would be on the list if being on the list was a reliable way to get a transplant.

And the question is, could we do some market design to increase the scope of kidney transplants?

And an idea had been proposed already for kidney exchange.

And that has to do with the fact, I already mentioned, that a healthy person has two kidneys and could donate one to save someone's life and still be healthy.

But it turns out...

Kidneys are a matching market.

You can't just take, they're not commodities.

You can't take just any kidney.

It has to be one that's compatible with your physiology.

And so you often get someone, you know, you might love someone.

And you're healthy enough to give a kidney, but you can't give it to the person you love who needs one because they don't match.

And that could, one of the ways, one reason why people can't get kidneys from someone who loves them is they have developed antibodies to that person's proteins that mean that their immune system is ready to attack the kidney if it should appear.

And one way of developing antibodies is by giving birth to a child, right?

So children inherit their proteins half from mom and half from dad.

So a mother might, not always, but in course of childbirth, might develop antibodies to the father's human leukocyte antigens.

And if so, then she won't be able to take a kidney from the father of the children or the children, right?

because they also have those proteins.

So a lot of transplants like that, which shouldn't be

The mother isn't necessarily hard to find someone who could give her a kidney, but it's not in her family.

So kidney exchange is the idea that maybe you're in that situation.

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