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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think commodity markets are special.
They're a great market design invention.
Before the Chicago Board of Trade and before commodity markets in wheat,
If you wanted to buy wheat, you had to inspect it.
Every field of wheat is different.
And so there was a lot of work done before you could buy wheat.
You had to have someone go out and look at the field or look at the –
the harvested wheat and measure its water content and see how much hard red wheat was in and how much white wheat was in.
But the Chicago Board of Trade commodified it by having all these adjectives when we described the wheat, you know, number two, hard red winter wheat.
They all remove some of the possibilities so that when you buy bushels of that, 5,000 bushels at a time, you don't care who you're dealing with and you don't have to inspect it.
And that's why you don't care who you're dealing with because if it was farm by farm, you'd care which farm you were dealing with and you'd want to buy from someone who you'd bought from in the past and who had reliably kept the soft wheat out of the hard wheat.
Yeah.
And there are other podcasts, so not everyone will want to be on your podcast.
So matching markets are markets where you can't just choose what you want.
You also have to be chosen.
Well, in a commodity market, since you don't care who you're buying from and they don't care who they're selling to, you can just quote a price.
You can say, I would like to buy some Microsoft shares at this price.
And you might want to sell at that price.
And then we have a transaction.
And I don't worry whether you've taken good care of those shares while you had them.
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