TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ashlagi,Itai
AU  - Roth,Alvin E.
TI  - Individual Rationality and Participation in Large Scale, Multi-Hospital Kidney Exchange
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16720
PY  - 2011
Y2  - January 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16720
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16720.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Itai Ashlagi
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sloan School of Management, E62-577
Cambridge, MA 02142
E-Mail: iashlagi@mit.edu

Alvin E. Roth
Department of Economics
Stanford University
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/725-9147
E-Mail: alroth@stanford.edu
AB  - As multi-hospital kidney exchange clearinghouses have grown, the set of players has grown from patients and surgeons to include hospitals. Hospitals have the option of enrolling only their hard-to-match patient-donor pairs, while conducting easily arranged exchanges internally. This behavior has already started to be observed.

We show that the cost of making it individually rational for hospitals to participate fully is low in almost every large exchange pool (although the worst-case cost is very high), while the cost of failing to guarantee individually rational allocations could be large, in terms of lost transplants. We also identify an incentive compatible mechanism.
ER  -