Repugnant Markets

Mises Media · Jul 22, 2026

Alvin Roth won a Nobel Prize for designing workarounds to markets society finds morally repugnant. Sandy Klein argues the workarounds aren't needed. Taking Roth's objections in turn—that such markets are too thin, that participants won't reveal their preferences, that the offense others feel is a negative externality—she shows each dissolves under Austrian analysis: repugnance is simply a subjective preference, already priced into how people act, and not a market failure at all. She then applies the point to transplantable organs, where a 1984 ban on sales functions as a price ceiling of zero…