Organ Donation via Changes in the Default Choice or Allocation Rule

Zackary Hawley, Danyang Li and Kurt Schnier ()

No 2012-15, Experimental Economics Center Working Paper Series from Experimental Economics Center, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University

Abstract: The supply of deceased donor organs is a limiting factor for transplantation based therapies. This research utilizes a laboratory experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative public policies targeted at increasing the rate of deceased donor organ donation. The experiment includes treatments across different default choices (opt-in versus opt-out) and organ allocation rules (without versus with priority rule) inspired by the donor registration systems applied in different countries. Furthermore, the experiment includes a controlled treatment to measure the effects of a neutral versus descriptive framing of the decision task. Our results indicate that the opt-out system with priority rule generates the largest increase in organ donation relative to an opt-in only program. However, sizeable gains are achievable using either a priority rule or opt-out program separately, with the opt-out rule generating approximately 80% of the benefits achieved under a priority rule program.

JEL-codes: C91 I10 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31
Date: 2012-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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