MATCHMAKERS: Congratulations to this year's two Nobel laureates in economics, Lloyd S. Shapley and Alvin E. Roth for the theory and practice of finding solutions to who gets what in a market. Roth, who this summer jumped ship from Harvard to join the Stanford faculty, used the approach in 2003 to help redesign New York City's high school admissions system to best match students' high school preferences with schools willing to accept them. Roth, a specialist on matching algorithms, has also applied Shapley's theoretical approach to designing medical residency programs and kidney donation swaps.
