Find The Right Kidney Donors Using Matching Market
The economist, Alvin Roth, who won a Nobel Prize in 2012 for his excellent work on matching markets wrote a new book called Who Gets What—and Why? In this book, he introduces very interesting application of matching markets such as assignment of medical residencies and finding kidney donors.
Before this idea emerged, most kidney transplant centers ran their own primitive database. Using this plain method, kidney donors and patients can’t be linked to each other easily and accurately because the database for one kidney transplant is limited. However, Roth thinks that this is not the best way to find matching kidneys for each patient. He created a marketplace in the kidney transplant “business.” First, he got the permission to work with several kidney transplant center so that he could get a bigger database. Then, he linked all the kidney donors with patients who are able to accept the kidney after doing blood tests. As what we learned from lectures, each kidney is evaluated based on the donor’s health condition and how well it matches with the patients. Using matching markets, we can easily match the best kidney for each patient. In this matching market system, Roth paired patients with multiple donors so that if one of the donors changed his mind in the last minute, the patient wouldn’t be left without a kidney.
From helping the health system using economics knowledge, Alvin Roth realized that there is a severe shortage of organs around the world. Obviously, paying for a kidney is illegal all over the world. Therefore, Roth believes that the hospital should try to reimburse the donors’ costs from insurance for example to encourage more people to become a donor.
Reference: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/06/11/412224854/how-an-economist-helped-patients-find-the-right-kidney-donor