Alvin Roth

And what he means by that is –

That collectively we're aggregating our information.

We're pursuing our private goals while being constrained by the other people's pursuit in ways that might produce good outcomes.

And so that's the joint action of many people.

That's the aggregating of information.

Oh, not at all.

In fact, I don't even know that that's an ideal.

When you go into a market, you have some information

private information about what brings you here today, what are you looking to get.

And, you know, maybe you want to buy wheat from me or maybe you want to hire me.

Those are things that, and you may not know, I mean, you want to hire someone, but part of the market, part of a labor market's job is to help you decide whether you want to hire me.

And so we have to exchange information so that we can see whether we're a match, whether I want to work for you, whether you want to hire me.

Well, so markets don't always maximize, but they try to reach outcomes that are as good as possible for the market participants, given what everyone else is doing.

So in labor markets, we sometimes invoke this idea that we call a stable matching, which is a market where I may not get the job I want.

most and you may not hire the person you want most but if you hire me it's because the people you preferred to hire didn't want to work for you they got jobs they like better and the people who I would have preferred to be hired by didn't want to hire me and so you and I are doing as well as we can

Absolutely.

Markets are human artifacts.

They're built by people to serve different purposes, but to serve their participants.

And I'm a market designer.

I work in the part of economics that talks about how we should –