Incentivizing Organ Donation Under Constraints: Theory and Experiment

Topic:

Incentivizing Organ Donation Under Constraints: Theory and Experiment

Time&Date: 

 13:00-14:15 pm, 2019/11/15 (Friday)

Venue:

 Room 619, Teaching A

Speaker:

Prof. Mengling Li (Xiamen University)

Abstract:

The ever-increasing shortage of organs for transplantation has motivated many innovative policies to promote organ supply. A well-designed organ allocation policy helps to moderate organ scarcity by improving allocation efficiency and providing stronger donation incentives. This paper studies the efficacy of the donor-priority rule in promoting deceased organ donation under blood-type compatibility constraints in both theory and the laboratory. Compared with a scenario in which transplantations are operated only within the same blood-type cohort, we find that allowing cross-blood-type transplantations discourages the donation incentives of hard-to-match agents (e.g., O type), while easy-to-match agents (e.g., AB type) have higher incentives to donate. More importantly, we show that under mild conditions, the aggregate donation rate is lower with cross-blood-type transplantations.