 Organ donation and reciprocityHua-Jing Han and Matthias Wibral Journal of Economic Psychology, 2020, vol. 81, issue C Abstract: The willingness to donate organs post-mortem varies considerably both across and within countries. Linking these differences to personal characteristics is an important focus of research investigating the supply of donor organs. Anecdotal evidence and previous findings indirectly suggest that the desire to reciprocate others’ (un)willingness to donate organs plays an important role in the decision to become an organ donor. We use individual measures of reciprocity in a large, representative survey in Germany and relate these to organ donation attitudes and behavior. Higher positive reciprocity is associated with a higher general willingness to donate organs, but it does not correlate with donor card possession. Individuals with higher negative reciprocity have a lower general willingness to donate organs and are less likely to have a donor card. Our findings open up the possibility of a double dividend of measures that increase organ donations. These could yield an additional increase of organ donations via a feedback loop through reciprocity. Keywords: Organ donation; Reciprocity; Personality; Health economics; Advance directive (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:81:y:2020:i:c:s0167487020300908 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2020.102331 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
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