Nobel laureate Alvin Roth appeared in front of over 200 people at the Lied Center Tuesday to analyze the marketplaces for certain goods where the presence of money often throws up moral red flags in the general public.

Alvin Roth is a distinguished professor of economics at Stanford University and a distinguished professor emeritus of economics and business administration at Harvard Business School. Roth won the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for his work in designing practical markets for goods and services that are difficult to price.

It was that kind of work, specifically designing markets for kidney transplants, among others, that won Roth the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics, which he shared with UCLA professor emeritus Lloyd Shapley.

The speech was part of the Bold Aspirations Visitor and Lecture Series and sponsored by Kansas University’s School of Business and departments of philosophy and economics.

Roth, a distinguished professor of economics at Stanford University, first addressed the fickle nature of these markets, which he describes as “repugnant.” He used examples such as the slave trade, indentured servitude, marijuana and interest on loans as examples of markets that went from being admissible to unacceptable, or vice versa. Not to mention the legality of such things can vary across the globe.

Money has a way of rendering certain markets as repugnant, Roth said. Kidney transplants, he said, are normal; however it is illegal for organs to be bought or sold.

In order to create some benefits of a marketplace without using money, Roth helped devise a donor-exchange system to help facilitate transplants. He explained that a common occurrence is that a patient will have a willing donor in a loved one, but that person is incompatible for a transplant.

The market will then match the incompatible donor and patient with another pair that is also incompatible for each other, and arrange four surgeries, wherein the patients come out in the end with the kidney they needed to survive.

Roth described that kind of system as an “in-kind” exchange that the United States government ultimately did not view as unlawful.

“We don’t allow just any market, and that’s a complicated issue which I don’t pretend to understand,” Roth said. “But even when we don’t allow markets, we can sometimes bring some of the benefits of markets to the people who need it.”