Market design for living-donor organ exchanges: An economic policy perspective

Within the last decade, the use of living-donor kidney exchanges for transplants has emerged as a cross-disciplinary success for medical doctors and ethicists, market design economists, and computer scientists. This paper describes the fronts on which these efforts have been successful and what needs to be done further to increase their impact. This paradigm is also partially being applied to liver exchanges. There are other organs for which living donation is possible and gains from exchange can be much bigger than for kidneys. Recent academic work on single-graft liver and dual-donor organ exchanges for lobar lung, dual-graft liver, and simultaneous liver-kidney transplantation are also discussed.