[4][5] In 2012, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design".

Roth graduated from Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1971 with a bachelor's degree in Operations Research.

While at Pittsburgh, he also served as a fellow in the university's Center for Philosophy of Science and as a professor in the Katz Graduate School of Business.

[17] In October 2012, Roth was the co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Lloyd S. Shapley, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that it awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize jointly to Roth and Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."

He also helped redesign existing institutions for matching new doctors with hospitals, students with schools, and organ donors with patients.

These reforms are all based on the Gale-Shapley algorithm, along with modifications that take into account specific circumstances and ethical restrictions, such as the preclusion of side payments.

Roth did foundational theoretical work on kidney exchange along with Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver,  and later on with Itai Ashlagi and other co-authors.

[19][20] Roth, along with Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver, were one of the first to note the similarity between kidney exchange and one-sided matching described by Lloyd Shapley and Herbert Scarf.

They adapted the David Gale's top-trading-cycle algorithm to allow the one-sided matching with waiting-list options, and proposed efficient and incentive-compatible chain selection rules.

Roth and coauthors have continued to contribute to ethical discussions and to practical operational designs that can facilitate global kidney chains.

In 2021, a kidney exchange was conducted between Israel and the UAE where Roth and his colleagues like Dr Michael Rees and Itai Ashlagi played key roles.

Roth and his colleagues Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Parag Pathak proposed David Gale and Lloyd Shapley's incentive-compatible student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm to the school board in 2003.

[29][30] Working with Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, and Tayfun Sonmez, Roth presented a similar measure to Boston's public school system in 2003.

[31] Some Boston parents had informally recognized this feature of the system and developed detailed lists in order to avoid having their children administratively assigned.

[32][33] Boston held public hearings on the school selection system and finally in 2005 settled on David Gale and Lloyd Shapley's incentive-compatible student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm.

Roth's 1984 paper on the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) highlighted the system designed by John Stalknaker and F. J. Mullen in 1952.

[34] Roth proved that the mechanism used in NRMP was both stable and strategy-proof for unmarried medical residents but deferred to future study the question of how to match married couples efficiently.

[39] In a series of papers with Judd Kessler, Roth investigates economic and psychological forces that influence organ donation decisions.

A notable insight from this work suggest that organ allocation policy giving priority on waiting lists to those who previously registered as donors has a significant positive impact on registration.

In another paper, Roth and Kessler found that giving potential donors more opportunities to donate organs while providing them with more information can increase registrations.

In 2005, the American Economic Association (AEA) asked Roth to chair a new Ad Hoc Committee on the job market for economists.

Since 1974 the AEA helped make the market thicker by publishing Job Openings for Economists (JOE), initially as a hardcopy periodical and since 2002 exclusively online.

Unlike earlier experimental work by Vernon Smith, Charles Plott, and others, Roth and his coauthors appealed to sociological and psychological concepts to explain how subjects deviated from rationally predicted outcomes right from the start.

[57] Along with some of his early collaborators in experimental economics, most notably Michael Malouf and J. Keith Murnighan, tested the predictions of cooperative bargaining theory in the laboratory.

[58][59] This work provided important empirical evidence to support the claim that cooperative bargaining models were useful to predict the qualitative effects of changes in risk aversion.

Roth has also conducted a series of experiments to test the predictions of non-cooperative bargaining theory in collaboration with Jack Ochs.

Roth, along with Vesna Prasnikar, Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara, and Shmuel Zamir, published an influential study to investigate bargaining across four different countries (Israel, Japan, USA, and the former Yugoslavia).

[citation needed] In 1978 Roth took a semester leave at the Economics Department at Stanford while being a faculty member at the University of Illinois, where he taught a course whose lecture notes became a textbook on axiomatic models of bargaining.

In the early 2000s, together with Paul Milgrom, Roth taught the first graduate course on Market Design, which brought together topics on auctions, matching, and other related areas.

His elder son, Aaron Roth, is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania.