Incentives to Donate

Judd Kessler, a Wharton business and public policy professor, and Alvin Roth, a Harvard economics professor, recently published the results of their research on the benefits of an organ allocation policy. Kessler and Roth tested whether an organ allocation policy that gives priority on waiting lists to people who register as organ donors would result in a significant increase in registration numbers.

In their paper entitled Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate, Kessler and Roth describe an experiment they used to mimic organ donation decisions. When a priority policy was introduced in the experiment, the subjects’ willingness to pay the cost of donation increased over 100%, to between 70% and 80% of subjects registering to donate.

Currently, only 40% of eligible Americans are registered organ donors. Texas and New York, the second and third most populous states, have organ donation rates of only 7% and 15% respectively.

For more information on Kessler and Roth’s research, see How to Encourage People to Become Organ Donors: An Incentive System with Heart, Knowledge@Wharton, Oct. 7, 2011.