This is The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie, and my guest today is the economist Alvin E. Roth,

who won a Nobel Prize in 2012, and is the author most recently of the new book,

Moral Economics, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work?

Thanks for talking to reason.

Thanks for having to reason.

Oh, thanks for having me.

Okay.

And let's, we, just to clear it up, you mentioned it in the book, but you're not related to Alvin Fats Roth.

Absolutely.

Who, a notorious college basketball player who was part of the great city college of New York,

NIT and NCAA championship team in 1951.

That's correct. When people ask me if I'm the Alvin Roth, I have to say no, I'm an economist.

Yeah. And I want to get back to, you know, that was a big scandal mostly about point shaving,

which is interesting. And you talk a bit about gambling and that.

And I want to come back to that in a little bit.

But first, let's, you know, your book is about what you call repugnant transactions.

Explain what a repugnant transaction is.

Okay.

So the book is about something broader than repugnant transactions, which I call controversial

market.

But a repugnant transaction, a repugnant market made of repugnant transactions is a special kind

of controversial market.

...