Title: Congested Waiting Lists and Organ Allocation

Abstract:
More than 25% of the kidneys that are recovered from deceased donors in the U.S. and are offered to patients on national waiting list are not utilized. We discuss how waiting list designs can suffer from a form of congestion that can lead to discarding valuable organs. Congestion arises from the interaction of a physical limit on the number of patients that can sequentially consider an organ before it accrues excess cold ischemic time while patients have the incentives to obtain organs of high quality. We develop a framework to study equilibria of waiting lists with congestion and show that congestion provides a strong enough externality to substantively affect welfare and wastage. We further show how practical features in waiting lists can affect congestion, including recent design changes, and discuss policies and market designs that can mitigate congestion.

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Itai Ashlagi is a Professor at the Management Science & Engineering Department.

He is interested in game theory and the design and analysis of marketplaces. He is especially interested in marketplaces, in which matching is an essential activity. markets, for which he developed mechanisms using tools from operations/cs and economics. His work influenced the practice of Kidney exchange, for which he has become a Franz Edelman Laureate. Ashlagi received his PhD in operations research from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Before coming to Stanford he was an assistant professor of Operations Management at Sloan, MIT and prior to that a postdoctoral researcher at HBS. He is the recipient of the outstanding paper award in the ACM conference of Electronic Commerce 2009. His research is supported by the NSF including an NSF-CAREER award.