Incentivizing organ donation with priority voucher : an experimental study

Abstract

A well-designed organ allocation priority policy is crucial in moderating the organ supply shortage by incentivizing organ donation. We propose two modifications to the basic donor priority rule to further incentivize people to donate. Namely, a donor’s priority (in the term of a “priority voucher”) can be transferred to his offspring upon designation or can be passed over through inheritance. A laboratory experiment was developed to test for the effectiveness of the two types of priority vouchers with the basic donor priority rule being the benchmark. Results suggest that higher flexibility in voucher inheritance has a stronger crowding-out effect on donation rate. Consequently, there is no significant change in the aggregate welfare among all treatments.