Who gets what - and why : understand the choices you have, improve the choices you make

This book shows how our lives are shaped not only by the choices we make, but by the choices we have. From dating, school and university applications to the job market, understand the most important decisions you’ll ever make with insights from a Nobel Prize-winner. Who Gets What and Why is a piquantly written, mind-expanding exploration of the markets that matter most to many of us.

If you’ve ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to university or guided your child into a good school, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you have participated in a matching market.

They are everywhere around us and account for some of the biggest technological successes of the decade, like Uber and Airbnb.

Matching markets can even be the gatekeeper of life itself, guiding how desperately ill patients receive scarce organs for transplants. Alvin E. Roth shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering research into market design – the principles that govern all kinds of markets where money isn’t the only factor in determining who gets what.

His book reveals what factors make these markets work well – or badly – and shows us all how to recognise a good match and make smarter, more confident decisions.