Mechanism Design In Organ Donation

Organ transplant surgery is the most effective method for treating patients with organ failure.Although its technology has been achieving tremendous progress in the past few decades,it is always the problem that the supply of organs is far less than the demand.In addition,the platform of organ donation is different from the ordinary cash market.Due to ethical,moral and legal restrictions,organs'supply and demand cannot be adjusted by a market price.Therefore,how to incentivize people to register as deceased organ donors is not only of great social significance,but also a valuable mechanism design problem.Based on game theoretical model of donor priority rule[1],namely giving priority on waiting lists to those who previously registered as donors,this paper embeds the blood-type(AB-O)compatibility constraints into an organ allocations framework.We discuss the incentives of agents with different blood-type of agents under the rule and evaluate the average donation rate for the whole society,through both theoretical analysis and laboratory experiments.In the theoretical analysis,we find that since the probabilities of receiving organs are different between two groups,the agents have different willingness to register.When organ resources are scarce,agents who are more difficult to be matched(e.g.O-type)have less incentive to donate compared with those who are easier to be matched(e.g.AB-type).As for the whole society,the average donation rate with the blood-type compatibility constraints is lower than that in the benchmark without such constraints.That is,to some extent,the blood-type barrier weakens the positive incentive effects of the donor priority rule on the organ donation rate.In the experiment,based on the theoretical model,we simulate the environment of organ donation and carry out multiple rounds of repeated games.The data shows that there are differences in donation incentives between different groups with the blood-type compatibility constraints,which are consistent with our theoretical model.