How to Fix a Broken Marketplace

Alvin E. Roth was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science this week for his Harvard Business School research into market design and matching theory. This article explores his research. Key concepts include:

Successful marketplaces must be "thick, uncongested, and safe."

Sufficient "thickness" means there are enough participants in the market to make it thrive.

"Congestion" is what can happen when markets get too thick too fast: there are heaps of potential players, but not enough time for transactions to be made, accepted, or rejected effectively.

"Safety" refers to an environment in which all parties feel secure enough to make decisions based on their best interests, rather than attempts to game a flawed system.

by Carmen Nobel

An economic handyman of sorts, Alvin E. Roth fixes broken markets.

As a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer in the field of market design, the Harvard Business School professor cofounded a kidney donation matching system for New England, corrected public school choice programs in New York and Boston, and tackled the market for new medical residents, economists, and lawyers. (Forbes magazine named him one of the world's "seven most powerful new economists.")

"Market design is the engineering part of game theory," Roth explains. "It's the underlying science of how the details work and how the parts fit together. We deal with much more complicated games than the game theory usually deals with."

In short, Roth has determined that successful marketplaces require three key elements. "They must be thick, uncongested, and safe," he says.

“Market design teaches us both about the details of market institutions and about the general tasks markets have to perform.”

Having sufficient "thickness" means there are enough participants in the market to make it thrive. "Congestion" is what can happen when markets get too thick too fast: there are heaps of potential players, but not enough time for transactions to be made, accepted, or rejected effectively. "Safety" refers to an environment in which all parties feel secure enough to make decisions based on their best interests, rather than attempts to game a flawed system.

Many markets must also overcome the fact that some transactions are considered repugnant, especially in the infancy of an industry. (For instance, life insurance—in which companies essentially place bets on when a customer will die—used to be considered extremely repugnant. But now it's a thriving industry.)

Roth discusses these and other markets in his reflective paper What Have We Learned from Market Design?, which draws from decades of his fieldwork. In the paper, published in 2008 and updated in September 2010, Roth discusses how issues of thickness, congestion, and safety impaired several important markets—and how market design made things better.

Thickness:A classic example of a thickness problem is the process of helping nephrology patients in need of kidney transplants. In 2006, some 5,000 patients in the United States either died while on the waiting list for a new kidney or were removed from the list as "too sick to transplant," Roth says.

The system is rife with trouble. First of all, "there aren't enough deceased donors," Roth says. Second, while healthy people are able to live with a single kidney—and therefore able to donate one—it's illegal for them to sell one to a needy patient, owing to the aforementioned repugnance issue. Finally, those people willing to give up a kidney usually do so for a friend or relative, but those would-be donors often are incompatible with their intended recipient. "The problem with live donation is that you might not be able to give a kidney to the person you want to give to," Roth says.

Historically, those incompatible donors would be sent home, and their sick loved ones would wait for a deceased donor. But a few years ago Roth started studying the idea of a kidney exchange system: Say person A wants to give a kidney to person B, but their blood types don't match. Meanwhile, person C wants to give a kidney to person D, but their immune systems are incompatible. However, person A happens to be compatible with person D, and person C is compatible with person B. Each party has what the other party needs, creating a situation that economists call a "double coincidence of wants."

Roth found that while such exchanges did occur occasionally, which proved their feasibility, they were extremely rare prior to 2004. The market lacked thickness, due to a lack of recordkeeping. Because potential donors were not patients, there was no official record indicating that they might be available for a kidney exchange.

In 2004, he and fellow economists Tayfun Sönmez and M. Utku Ünver coauthored a paper showing that the kidney exchange market would benefit from an official clearinghouse that included a computerized database of incompatible patient-donor pairs. In addition to direct exchanges, the paper described exchanges that included three- and four-way matches—as well as a system in which a donor could give a kidney to a stranger in exchange for the donor's loved one receiving high priority on the cadaver waiting list.

“We deal with much more complicated games than the game theory usually deals with.”

They sent the paper to several kidney surgeons. The medical director of the New England Organ Bank met with Roth to pursue the idea further. This led to the founding of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, which culls data from 14 transplant centers in the New England area, allowing incompatible donor pairs to find possible exchanges. So far, the program has been responsible for 73 successful exchanges. (Hospitals elsewhere have followed suit. Nationally, in 2005 there were 27 reported transplants involving an exchange; in 2007, there were121 such transplants; and in 2009, 304.)

"What would really help us have a thick market would be to have a well-organized national market," Roth says. "So far we're dealing with regional markets and trying to expand them."

Congestion:
When Roth and his colleagues were invited to improve the way New Yorkers are matched with high schools, they recognized a problem of market congestion. This is a common problem in markets where lots of parties are deciding whether to choose each other—first-year law firm jobs, for example, or competitive schools.

In New York City, public school students must apply to a high school of their choice, much as students in the rest of the country apply to private school. Each year, more than 90,000 students must be assigned to more than 500 high schools.

In the past, the system worked like this: The New York City Department of Education asked students to submit a ranked list of the five high schools they'd most like to attend, and the students would oblige. Next, the department would photocopy the list and send a copy to each of the five schools, which would then determine which students they wanted to accept, waitlist, or reject. Accepted students would decide whether to accept the schools back. Schools that still had vacancies could make a second round of offers and then a third. The process stopped after three rounds.

But there was a problem. The three rounds were not sufficient to assign every student to a school. Annually, while about 17,000 students would receive initial offers from multiple schools, about 50,000 received a single initial offer, and 30,000 were hastily shoved into schools that weren't on their choice list.

Administrators were well aware of where their schools ranked on each list, and some chose only those students who had ranked their school first. ("This meant you didn't really have five choices," Roth says.) Sometimes principals would withhold open slots, anticipating the chance to make late offers to high-achieving students who didn't like their initial assignments.

To solve the problem, Roth and his colleagues designed a "deferred acceptance algorithm." Rather than simultaneously apply to multiple schools, each student would apply to his or her highest ranked school. Each school would accept a set number of applicants and reject the rest, leaving room for the next round. Each student who didn't get into the first-choice school would apply to the second choice. This went on for up to 12 rounds.

In the first year of the new system, only about 3,000 students ended up in schools to which they didn't apply—and some of those were students who hadn't even submitted applications in the first place. The vast majority of students were accepted into one of their choices. "You might not get your first choice, but the system makes it safe to try; you can't do any better than to list your choices in their true order," Roth says.

Safety:
Meanwhile, the Boston Public Schools faced an issue of safety with its school choice system, although administrators were initially unaware of that. Ostensibly, the majority of prospective students in the city received their first-choice school, which led school officials to believe everything was fine. But it wasn't.

In the Boston system, students would send a ranked list to the city. (Unlike in New York, Boston did not include administrators of individual schools in the process.) The central administration tried to assign a first-choice school to as many students as possible, with priority given to students whose siblings already attended the school or who lived within its "walk zone." For each school with slots still available, the city would assign a round of second choices, and so on.

The problem was that a student who didn't get into a first-pick school wasn't likely to get into a second-pick school either, because that second-pick school would already be full of students who had listed it as a first pick. "That meant it might be too risky to choose your first choice," Roth says.

Savvy students and parents knew to avoid listing the very best schools as their first choice. After all, only kids with priority at that school were likely to get into that school anyway. But not everyone was savvy. Some 19 percent of applicants did list over-demanded schools as their top two choices—and 27 percent of those ended up without an assignment at all. And many of those who did receive their first choices were unhappy because their choices were strategic, rather than honest.

Roth and his colleagues recommended two design algorithms that were essentially strategy-proof, making it safe and reasonable for students to apply to the schools that they honestly wanted most. The Boston School Committee adopted the proposal.

Roth also has helped design markets to match new doctors with residency programs and new economists with new jobs. Lately, he has been looking at the market for new lawyers, in which law school students compete for the best jobs and firms compete for the best students in a very tight economy. In order to beat the competition, firms are offering jobs to students before they even begin their second year of law school—and demanding that the students decide immediately. This leads to a safety issue, in which both a student and a firm are committing to a decision before either has a real inkling of what kind of lawyer the student will become in two years.

"Market design teaches us both about the details of market institutions and about the general tasks markets have to perform," Roth writes in "What Have We Learned from Market Design?" "Among the general tasks markets have to perform, difficulties in providing thickness, dealing with congestion, and making participation safe and simple are often at the root of market failures that call for new market designs."

About the Author

Carmen Nobel is the senior editor of Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

Anonymous

All of these examples show the primacy of information symmetry as a market organizing principle. Participants are obliged to "game the system" when there is not enough information for them to make honest, efficient, and effective decisions, or when they are a disadvantaged party with regard to information. Secrecy, both institutional and industry-wide, is the obverse of this. As long as doctors and hospitals refuse to share their patient safety outcomes and sue their patients and fire their staff for "whistleblowing", the US healthcare system will be unsafe, inefficient, and ineffective. As long as the financial services industry pays big money and exerts political clout to avoid regulation and public accountability, the world will have trashed economic systems.

Kapil Kumar Sopory

Company Secretary, SMEC(India) Private Limited

Successful marketplaces depend on a variety of factors in addition to the three - thick,uncongested and safe as determined by Roth. Taking a cue from banking which was my profession over decades, we were always keen to mobilise more and more business,i.e.,customers, and were generally not scared of congestion. Yes, we did promptly organise resources- manpower, machines and others- required to handle the growth.
Marketplaces can also get broken due to sudden actions taken by authories to enforce changes. These can include restricting trade to specific areas, banning certain activities, stringency in tax laws forcing businesses to make changes, etc.
Safety is of course very important factor and it must include every aspect likely to impact.

Efra?n Rosas

After reading this article, I realized why Professor Roth was named one of the world's seven most powerful economists.
He has the capacity to translate theory into real-applicable examples. Policy makers should base their decisions on the advice coming from minds like Prof. Roth's. However, I am wondering if Prof. Roth through Harvard University has given any advice to the government on how to manage very important issues like the U.S. Health-Care system.

Daryl Kelly

Did it really take a prof from Harvard to solve these problems. People should pay more attention to what they are doing. This is not proof of Prof. Roth being an truly insightful Behavioral Economist, but proof of how lame the game is to begin with. How was the Kidney issue not spotted by a surgeon or administrator.... pathetic, how were no records being kept for available donors.... Albeit well done to prof Roth as he has improved the system. As far as I'm concerned it didn't really take a genius to do it. There are so many floors in our system(s) that intelligent people with simple problem solving skills could achieve similar results given the opportunity to be heard and their plans put into action. It would be quite interesting to have a website dealing with popular Social Economic Problems and encouraging the general public/members to establish solutions. Strategies could be voted on and the most popular are reviewed by
the profs and tweeked as necessary and taken to the right people to be applied.

Jason Vigneault

Student

All of the 'broken markets' described in this article are a result of a market that is superimposed by government or restricted by law. The problem that exists with kidney markets is a result of a law making it illegal to sell your kidney. If individuals were legally able to contract with others to sell/buy organs then the problem described in this article would cease to persist and organs would be allocated much more efficiently from those willing to sell their kidneys to those who want/need them most; the solution provided in this article may even continue to persist in such a market, though other methods will likely manifest as entrepreneurs search for the most efficient methods of allocating kidneys.

The problem that persists with public schools and the assignment of students is similar. Why is it that there is no problem with students getting into the college of their choice? Students are not allowed to 'vote with their feet' to go to the school of their choice. The government has 'created' a 'market' in which individuals apply for and get into public schools. Private markets are not 'created', they manifest on their own. We, as individuals, do not need to ensure that there is a grocery store in our community with fresh food; a grocery store is built in the private market because entrepreneurs have a profit incentive to do so. If we remove the public provision of education and allow a private market to thrive, the situation where students are not able to get into any of their choice schools would become a thing of the past.

Don't get me wrong, Professor Roth has increased the efficiencies of the markets described above, but the inefficiencies are a result of markets being superimposed by goverment (i.e. public school system) or laws restricting market participants from contracting with each other in a manner mutually agreed upon by both parties. I would instead like to see an example where there was a private market failure and Roth's market design has improved that market. Though if an individual accomplished this task I would consider them an entrepreneur, NOT a manipulator of markets.