Tuesday, May 24, 2016

A National Academy of Sciences report on kidney exchange, and market design

As part of their outreach to the general public, the National Academy of Sciences has initiated a series of  reports called A NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES SERIES ABOUT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND HUMAN BENEFIT: FROM RESEARCH TO REWARD

The first of these is about kidney exchange (mostly) and market design:
Matching Kidney Donors with Those Who Need Them—and Other Explorations in Economics by Nancy Shute

It has some nice graphics, and starts off this way:

"In the news, economists are often portrayed as number crunchers hidden away in universities. But they also journey out into the world, discovering problems and then charting a course to a solution. By applying economic theories to the shortage of kidneys, scientists have been able to save lives, cut medical costs, and reduce misery. Their innovations have spurred medical progress.

“Economics is about the real world,” said Alvin Roth, a Stanford University economist, when he won the Nobel Prize in 2012 for his work on matching markets, including the kidney donor matching problem."
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You can download a pdf version (without the nice graphics) here: Annotated version

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