Equilibrium Allocations Under Alternative Waitlist Designs: Evidence From Deceased Donor Kidneys
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deceased-donors-manuscript.pdf
Description
Submitted version
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838.28 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c1b6c2114d4a77e34542d7785abb102b
Author(s)
Agarwal, Nikhil
Date Issued
January 2021
Journal
Econometrica
Publisher
The Econometric Society
Citation
Agarwal, Nikhil et al. “Equilibrium Allocations Under Alternative Waitlist Designs: Evidence From Deceased Donor Kidneys.” Econometrica, 89, 1 (January 2021): 37-76 © 2021 The Author(s)
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Waitlists are often used to ration scarce resources, but the trade-offs in designing these mechanisms depend on agents' preferences. We study equilibrium allocations under alternative designs for the deceased donor kidney waitlist. We model the decision to accept an organ or wait for a preferable one as an optimal stopping problem and estimate preferences using administrative data from the New York City area. Our estimates show that while some kidney types are desirable for all patients, there is substantial match-specific heterogeneity in values. We then develop methods to evaluate alternative mechanisms, comparing their effects on patient welfare to an equivalent change in donor supply. Past reforms to the kidney waitlist primarily resulted in redistribution, with similar welfare and organ discard rates to the benchmark first-come, first-served mechanism. These mechanisms and other commonly studied theoretical benchmarks remain far from optimal. We design a mechanism that increases patient welfare by the equivalent of an 18.2% increase in donor supply.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA17017
