Abstract

Gale and Shapley’s 1962 American Mathematical Monthly paper, “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage,” is by now one of the most cited articles in the journal’s history, having served as the foundation for an entire branch of the field of market design. This success owes in large part to the beautiful, applicable, and surprisingly general theory of matching mechanisms uncovered in Gale and Shapley’s work. This talk traces the history and evolution of matching theory from that paper forward to the present day, along the way touching on real-world applications to everything from medical residency matching to electricity markets.

Speaker

Scott Duke Kominers is a Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit; as well as a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics and the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications; Co-Principal Investigator of the Harvard Crypto, Fintech and Web3 Lab; and an a16z crypto Research Partner. He teaches the MBA elective courses “Making Markets” (M2) and “Building Web 3 Businesses” (BW3B), along with a doctoral course on market design. He is an Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and serves on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Economic Literature. His first book is The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create.

Zoom Webinar Registration https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YyHyqlopTju-o1ncPd0Cqg#/registration