We show that kidney exchange markets suffer from market failures whose remedy could increase transplants by 30%–63%. First, we document that the market is fragmented and inefficient: most transplants are arranged by hospitals instead of national platforms. Second, we propose a model to show...

Waitlists are often used to ration scarce resources, but the trade-offs in designing these mechanisms depend on agents preferences. We study equilibrium allocations under alternative designs for the deceased donor kidney waitlist. We model the decision to accept an organ or wait for a preferable...

It has been previously shown that for sufficiently large pools of patient-donor pairs, (almost) efficient kidney exchange can be achieved by using at most 3-way cycles, i.e. by using cycles among no more than 3 patient-donor pairs. However, as kidney exchange has grown in practice, cycles among...

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. As multi-hospital kidney exchange clearinghouses have grown, the set of players has grown from patients and surgeons to include...