Who Gets What ― and Why

A good/OK pop econ book by Nobel Prize-winning Al Roth, about market design and matching algorithms and such. As Roth says, even Hayek - HAYEK - didn't believe markets are given to us by some (invisible) hand of a libertarian God, and thus market design is a powerful/worthwhile investigation and technocrats should be employed. Another nice parallel is evolution: natural selection != “progress” or the best, it just means the most survivaly. Thank you, Khan Academy, for blowing my mind about that, actually.

Roth gives several compelling examples of markets being broken and then fixed (and then sometimes broken again): school choice in New York and Boston; medical residency applications (complicated by married couples!); online dating; kidney donations; THE INTERTOOBS (i.e. Uber), and, perhaps my favorite, the great/hilarious drama that is law students applying for clerkships with Federal judges. There are detours into “repugnance” - i.e. while everything COULD have a price, we are unfortunately not Ferengi, we are humans, and thus our Rules of Acquisition are complicated by social/moral feelings of disgust and taboo (e.g. most countries don't let you sell your organs - except Iran does, btw!).

Natural/organic markets can have all sorts of crap happen to them: you want them to be thick and fast, not congested (like the market for academic economists trying to figure out their careers at the 3-day annual AEA meeting) and unravelled (like the market for judicial clerkships, where law students get offers before they even start school). It's all game theory - i.e. agents behaving strategically in a multi-stage game - and so there ARE some stable equilibria solutions. The “devil is in the details” in finding them.

Welp. I love market stuff and I love game theory and I love learning about Internet economics and I love the Ferengi, and so I was looking forward to this, but I found myself strangely unsatisfied. Often, it felt too pop; other times, it felt strangely abstract. Oh well.