Patients needing kidney transplants may have willing donors who cannot donate to them because of blood or tissue incompatibility. Incompatible patient-donor pairs can exchange donor kidneys with other such pairs. The situation facing such pairs resembles models of the “double coincidence of wants,” and relatively few exchanges have been consummated by decentralized means. As the population of available patient-donor pairs grows, the frequency with which exchanges can be arranged will depend in part on how exchanges are organized. We study the potential frequency of exchanges as a function of the number of patient-donor pairs, and the size of the largest feasible exchange. Developing infrastructure to identify and perform 3-way as well as 2-way exchanges will have a substantial effect on the number of transplants, and will help the most vulnerable patients. Larger than 3- way exchanges have much smaller impact. Larger populations of patient- donor pairs increase the percentage of patients of all kinds who can find exchanges.
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Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Microeconomics with number
0506001.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution D4 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Alvin E. Roth & Tayfun Sonmez & M. Utku Unver, 2004.
"Pairwise Kidney Exchange,"
Levine's Bibliography
122247000000000350, UCLA Department of Economics.
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Other versions:
Alvin E. Roth & Tayfun Sonmez & M. Utku Unver, 2004.
"Pairwise Kidney Exchange,"
NBER Working Papers
10698, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Alvin E. Roth & Tayfun Sonmez & M. Utku Unver, 2003.
"Kidney Exchange,"
NBER Working Papers
10002, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Atila Abdulkadiroğlu & Parag A. Pathak & Alvin E. Roth & Tayfun Sonmez, 2005.
"The Boston Public School Match,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 95(2), pages 368-371, May.
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