It’s not often, or ever, you see a Nobel Laureate writing about his ties to match-fixing.
That is until you see Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth writing in his new book that he feels “a certain connection” to point-shaving. It's just for reasons that have less to do with economics or match-manipulation and more because of a shared name.
Another Alvin Roth, nicknamed "Fats," was was banned from the NBA because of a college basketball point-shaving scandal that came to light in the early 1950s.
“He (Fats) was also sentenced to jail, but a judge permitted him to join the army instead,” Roth writes in his recently released book “Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.”
You make me sick
Roth’s mention of the other Alvin Roth and his thoughts about sports betting are not the focus of his new book. Instead, it centers on other “morally contested markets,” such as those involving drugs, kidney transplants, and medical aid in dying.
Still, Roth’s work in examining what he calls “repugnant transactions” brings to mind a lot of the discussion that goes on these days about legal sports betting in the U.S.
“Let’s call a transaction repugnant if all parties to the transaction want to engage in it, and others think they shouldn’t be allowed to for moral or religious reasons, even though those others can’t detect that the transaction has taken place unless someone tells them,” Roth writes.
That framework seems to apply to sports betting, something a lot of people do and a lot of others hate for various reasons. And Roth does briefly consider sports wagering in his chapter on "emerging controversies,” noting that “betting on sports and repugnance to it have a long history, going back at least to classical Greece and Rome.”
On @Freakonomics, SIEPR's Alvin Roth talked about assisted suicide, one of many "repugnant" markets he discusses in his new book, "Moral Economics." Here's Roth on our Econ To Go podcast, sharing his insights into illicit drug sales, organ donation + more: https://t.co/WPWwwj2yvz pic.twitter.com/rodxiVTu2Y
— Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (@SIEPR) June 25, 2026
The more recent history involves the internet, as online sports betting in the U.S. has boomed following the fall of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018. And even more recently, the conversation has grown to include prediction markets, the federally regulated exchanges that have made de facto wagering on sports possible in every state in the U.S.
These, too, are contested markets - legally, certainly, and perhaps morally as well. They are also relatively new things. And while Roth’s book doesn’t focus on them either, he still discussed it with me, and the thoughts of someone who jointly won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2012 (“for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design") are worth reading.
Roth spoke to Covers over the phone recently about his book and his framework for approaching “repugnant transactions,” which, yes, can include sports betting.
“Remember that when I say something is repugnant, I don't mean that I don't like it or that you should like it,” Roth said. “I mean that some people don't like it, and I think that gambling falls squarely into that category. Lots of people like to gamble, and lots of people, other people, think they shouldn't be allowed to, so it's a repugnant transaction, and there have been laws of all sorts allowing or banning it. And we've gone back and forth with the United States on lotteries, and more recently on sports betting.”
There are lots of similarities with the discourse around sports betting and that of other morally contested markets. Roth pointed to alcohol consumption as one example, and the era of total prohibition in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933.
“It didn't work very well,” Roth said. “That is, a lot of times when you try to ban things that people want to do, you just end up pushing them over into the criminally organized black markets, which is also the case with gambling.”
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Beware the black market(s)
This is indeed a line of argument that comes up time and time again with legalized sports betting. When PASPA was in effect, people were still betting on sports in lots of places where it wasn’t legal.
The “if you ban it, they’ll still do it” argument was even raised last week in Indiana, with regulators mulling a possible prohibition on college player prop betting. If you ban this, gaming commissioners were more or less warned, it will just happen where you can’t see or control it.
MLBPA proposes a complete ban on player props, wants MLB to lead joint lobbying effort
— David Payne Purdum (@DavidPurdum) June 26, 2026
w/ @JeffPassan https://t.co/UfrQkWe9NZ
Back to booze for a moment, then, the sale of which is now legal but regulated. There are age requirements for purchase, licenses needed to sell it, and zoning rules for where those businesses can operate, Roth notes. That hasn't solved all the problems, though, he says, and so organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous are also there to try to help.
So it is with legalized sports betting, too. Where prohibition fades, regulation may move in, and perhaps not always as comprehensively as people believe is needed. Roth mentions in his book more win-loss disclosure for bettors and the banning of credit cards for deposits as possible regulations, and those measures are increasingly being adopted by operators and states. Still, even that may not be enough.
“I fear that online gambling will have much to teach us about addiction,” Roth writes.
Roth also sees the potential for more shenanigans in our mostly online world of wagering, particularly with more prop and in-play betting markets. In the 1950s, you had to get a lot of players onside to try to shave some points; in the 2020s, a single player may have far greater influence over betting outcomes.
Kidneys, surrogacy, prostitution, gambling, price gouging, assisted dying: some transactions make people recoil, even when all parties consent. Cato’s @MrRBourne talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth about his new book, Moral Economics, what makes markets… pic.twitter.com/GxGjCKRvbi
— Cato Institute (@CatoInstitute) June 25, 2026
Still, there is a trade-off here (and Roth writes that repugnance "will force us to think" about trade-offs).
Yes, there is much more to bet on, but these are mostly online bets that can be easier to track and monitor for suspicious activity. Roth writes that “being able to detect unusual bets combined with unusual player behavior may help hold corruption of sporting events to manageable levels.”
Coalitions of the previously unwilling
At any rate, regulatory gaps or shortcomings or oversights, whatever you might call them, are not unique to sports betting, even though they may be cited as reasons why it perhaps should not be legal. And Roth says part of what he writes about is that “we probably shouldn't be shooting for consensus” anyway on these types of hot-button subjects.
“When we talk either about overcoming repugnance to allow bans to be relaxed or about enforcing bans or other regulations, since we’re not necessarily able to reach consensus, we may have to settle for coalition building,” he writes.
Those coalitions can make for strange bedfellows. Roth notes Canadian liquor company Seagram’s, the whiskey of which was smuggled into the U.S. from Canada during Prohibition, became an advocate for responsible drinking after the ban was over.
Online sports betting operators nowadays try to showcase their responsible gambling efforts, which Roth says could be good for their industry. And even when gambling is illegal, he says, there is still addiction that can lead to unfortunate things, such as borrowing money from loan sharks.
Hi-diddly-ho, neighborino
Again, gambling is not the focus of Roth’s work. Nor are prediction markets, which critics often describe as a new form of gambling. Yet Roth says one of the things he writes about is that it is hard to ban something in a given jurisdiction when it’s legally available and within reach in another jurisdiction.
“And, of course, the internet makes everybody a neighbor to everybody else,” Roth says.
In other words, the fact that prediction markets have popped up offering de facto sports wagering in states that have yet to legalize sports betting is not some new phenomenon. It’s all in keeping with society’s ongoing tug-of-war with morally contested markets. You can ban, you can regulate, but somebody will probably be unhappy in the end with what you’ve done and may still seek out what you’ve forbidden or restricted.
So maybe that’s the end result for sports betting, too. We’ll all just be differing degrees of mad about it for different reasons: too much, too little, too laissez-faire, too hands-on. Not that that’s an excuse for doing nothing, or for remaining silent. Adding your voice to the debate around a morally contested market means that, at the very least, it’s there. It will actually be contested.
“There are people who will engage in your absence if you withdraw, so that's also a reason to engage,” Roth says.
