Matching Market: Kidney Transplant
The article discusses Alvin Roth, an economist that applied his understanding of matching markets to match kidney donors to compatible recipients with those they have no other connection with. Alvin Roth got a prize for helping this issue with kidney donations. His concept of kidney matching with matching markets efficiently helped the medical field. The problems with kidney transplants these days are we lack donors. It’s not easy to find good compatible matches for patients who need it. Alvin used this chance to apply it to matching markets and this has helped save many people’s lives. There are 100,000 people waiting for kidneys in the US currently and we only have 17,000 transplants a year so we can say that it’s a very critical problem. In kidney business, supply does not equal demand. According to Alvin, kidneys are required by the law , to be free gifts exchanged between consenting adults.This is where Alvin says, if a system was created to diffuse this problem, it will be very useful.
Matching markets creates opportunities for interaction between buyers and sellers where there’s an implicit network encoding the access between the buyers and sellers. In this case, the kidney donation scenario can be viewed as a matching market where the recipients on the right represent subjects and the kidney donors on the left are the product. Since it’s a kidney donation matching, it is slightly different from other cases since it relies on blood type and other possible factors to be a match where prices aren’t fixed and couldn’t be purchased randomly. The matching market comes in when patients put in their preference for specific kidney traits and the goal is that a market matching concept can be found so each patient can be matched to their kidney preferences to get their transplant.
Although it’s a good and efficient way to help patients find the most compatible kidney donor to get their transplant, sometimes things don’t work out when there’s no perfect matching. There may be patients who still can’t be matched with a compatible donor to get a transplant which forms a constricted set in market matching – not every buyer has a match to another seller, donors and patients. When this case happens, Alvin did suggest that if an incompatible donor is matched with a patient that doesn’t work, they can give it to someone who is compatible and that patient can be on the top list for when a kidney is compatible for him. This will allow more lives to be saved, definitely more than 17,000 per year.
Relating this topic back to class, we talked about matching markets between sellers and buyers where sellers look to put a good on the market and sell them depending on how much they’re valued by the buyers who are interested in buying it. I think it’s fascinating that the matching market system can be applied to many different types of situations such as this kidney transplant because that means that more patients are getting more transplants and not left to die.
source: https://qz.com/421547/nobel-prize-winner-alvin-roth-explains-the-hidden-economics-behind-tinder-marriage-and-college-admissions/