Original version

BBC World Service Online

More or Less

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Tim Harford explains the numbers and statistics in the news and in life

Tim Harford explains the numbers and statistics in the news and in life.

More Or Less

More or Less: Life-saving Economics

News

Two surgeons conduct a kidney transplant

20/10/2012

Life-saving Economics

BBC World Service - More or Less, Life-saving Economics

How Nobel prize-winning economists Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley are helping save lives.

How Nobel prize-winning economists Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley are helping save lives, by enabling kidney transplants which would not otherwise have happened.

Few economists could honestly describe themselves as life-savers. Professor Al Roth from Stanford University in the United States doesn't describe himself that way either. But he is. His application of a kind of mathematics developed as a thought-experiment 50 years ago is keeping hundreds - perhaps thousands - of people alive by enabling kidney transplants which would not otherwise have happened. 

Al Roth was awarded the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this week. He shared it with Lloyd Shapley, the man behind that half-a-century-old thought experiment. In this week’s edition of More or Less Professor Al Roth tells Tim Harford how Shapley’s insights, and his own later – life-saving – work.

(Image: Two surgeons perform a kidney transplant, Credit: Getty Images)

Accessibility links

Programme Index

More or Less

Life-saving Economics

Genres

Brand

BBC World Service Online

About BBC World Service