Market design for living-donor organ exchanges

Abstract

Within the last decade kidney exchanges emerged as a modality of transplantation to better utilize living donation possibilities as a cross disciplinary success of medical doctors and ethicists, market design economists, and computer scientists. This paper summarizes at which fronts these efforts have been successful and what needs to be done further to increase their impact. Also this paradigm is 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 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.