Nobel economists' big impact: Kidney transplants

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http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/15/news/economy/nobel-prize-economics/

Nobel economists' big impact: Kidney transplants
By Aaron Smith

Economists whose work has led to nearly 2,000 kidney transplants across the United States have received their profession's ultimate international honor.
Alvin E. Roth of Harvard University and Lloyd S. Shapley of the University of California at Los Angeles were named recipients of the 2012 Nobel Prize for economics Monday at a news conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Roth and Shapley were honored for "the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design," according to a statement from The Royal Swedish Academy of Scientists.
Shapely co-developed a mathematical theory on resource allocation in the 1960s as applied to the job market. Roth's market design experiments based on Shapley's work, starting in the 1980s, were used for such matches as students with schools and organ donors with patients who need a transplant, according to the academy.
Roth, 60, who is moving to Stanford University from Harvard, and Shapley, 89, will share the prize of 8 million Swedish kronor, which is equal to nearly $1.2 million. When awakened by at his California home by a phone call informing him of the prize, Roth said, "I guess when I go to class this morning my students will pay more attention to me."
Asked about his future plans, Roth replied," Coffee."
Ruthanne Hanto, manager of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, said that the research of Roth and Shapley has helped to match nearly 2,000 kidney donors to recipients nationwide. She said the matches were based on mathematical studies involving blood types and antigens.
For Shapley, this is just the latest in a long list of honors and awards, which began in 1944, when he was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in the U.S. Army Air Corps.
A Nobel award in economics, officially called the Sveriges Riksban Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, has been given since 1969. The honor has been bestowed on 71 people so far, including one woman, Elinor Ostrom.

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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-economists-nobel-20121016,0,894573.story

2 Americans, 1 at UCLA, win Nobel in economics
By Don Lee, Larry Gordon and Adolfo Flores

For years, transplant surgeons have struggled with a vexing problem: seriously ill patients desperate for new kidneys and healthy people who were willing to donate an organ but had the wrong tissue type.

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http://www.firstpost.com/world/how-economics-nobel-winner-roth-sparked-a-kidney-donor-revolution-491867.html

How economics Nobel winner Roth sparked a kidney donor revolution

For Alvin Roth, joint winner of the 2012 Nobel prize for economics, studying the economy is about finding real-life solutions for real-life questions and never more so than in a revolutionary new system to match kidney donors with patients.

Roth and fellow laureate, the mathematician, Lloyd Shapley, have seen their groundbreaking work used in such diverse areas as matching up employers with job seekers, doctors with residency programs, and students with schools.

But arguably its greatest impact has been matching kidney donors to patients in a system that was first applied in New England hospitals under the New England Program for Kidney Exchange (NEPKE), a scheme Roth helped found in 2004-2005.

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