Metro

A ‘match’ for Nobel

Queens native Alvin Roth

Queens native Alvin Roth

WIN-WIN: Lloyd Shapley (left) and Queens native Alvin Roth share this year’s Nobel Prize for economics. (
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Two American scholars — one of them born in Queens — netted the Nobel economics prize yesterday for work on a matchmaking technique that has sharply reduced the number of New York students who end up in high schools they didn’t want to attend.

The algorithm that Lloyd Shapley of UCLA initially devised for theoretically matching men and women to make the most suitable marriages was expanded by Queens native Alvin Roth of Harvard to apply to other down-to-earth tasks.

Those tasks included matching new doctors with hospitals and kidneys with transplant recipients — as well as city students with schools they wanted.

“It’s about how we make choices, and how we get the things we get when we just can’t get them, when you have to be chosen,” said Roth, 60, the son of two schoolteachers and a graduate of Martin Van Buren HS in Queens.

“When you pick a spouse, you have to be chosen, too, and that’s true for schools and for jobs and in many areas. We participate in these two-sided choices.”

The Nobel awards committee, in citing Roth and Shapley, now 89, noted the success of their technique in handling applications of nearly 100,000 students to the city’s public high schools.

Before the revamped system was adopted nine years ago, students ranked their top five choices of schools on their applications.

But if a student wasn’t accepted by his first choice, his name would be passed on to his second choice and, if that failed, to the third — which might have already filled up their incoming classes by then.

As a result, about 30,000 kids a year ended up in schools they didn’t list at all.

Roth said he and colleagues were invited to redesign the admissions system using the matching formula — called a “deferred acceptance algorithm” — that was originated decades before by Shapley and another scholar, the late David Gale.

The formula was fed into the city Department of Education computer for the 2003-04 school year, and students were given more choices — they could apply to 12 programs.

“The new algorithm proved to be successful, with a 90 percent reduction in the number of students assigned to schools for which they had expressed no preference,” the Nobel committee said.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott congratulated Roth yesterday, saying the revised admissions process “has benefited thousands of students since we implemented it.”

Roth added yesterday, “There are a lot of things that you get in life that you can’t just choose. You also have to be chosen. And that’s what we study. We study matching.”