I know it was slightly tangential, but the organ matchmaking software was really interesting to me. I doubt this is how the idea was conceived, but I think when you look at it in a particular way, it seems like a really elegant solution to an important coordination problem.
(Content note: organ trade.)
Currently, a big stumbling block with organ trade is that suppliers can only supply organs in an altruistic context because of moral intuitions about the respective sanctities of life and money; buying and selling organs is impure. This is really bad because it limits most donations to those from family members and those from people who donate their organs upon death. Family members aren’t always compatible, and organs from cadavers don’t last as long and are more likely to contain cancers. If you’re incompatible with a family member or you want to splurge on the extra expected lifespan afforded by a non-cadaveric organ, you can’t sell your organ and use the money to buy a compatible/non-cadaveric one from someone else. There seem to be a great many trades that don’t take place because of solvable spatial and temporal constraints that would be avoided by the use of a medium of exchange like money. So, the legal organ trade is relatively inefficient in most countries.
The really cynical version of the problem that you’re trying to solve, before you ever write the extremely important matchmaking algorithms that are easy to overlook from this point of view, is “How do I efficiently allocate organs without buying or selling them?” The current system of organ donation is practically a barter system, there must be a coincidence of wants between donor and recipient. So, one interpretation of what matchmaking software does is make pledges to donate organs into a medium of exchange when you can’t use the normal medium of exchange for political reasons. When you make pledges to donate into a credible signal that you will in fact donate given the satisfaction of a certain set of easily verifiable conditions, you can use that signal in place of money to make more complex trades that you couldn’t otherwise make with ‘pure barter’.
Kind of useless armchair scholarship I guess, but I thought it was elegant.
(After cursory research I lean pro-legal organ trade (something more market-like than what exists today); willing to expand on this if anyone’s interested in collecting a new contrarian opinion.)
I know it was slightly tangential, but the organ matchmaking software was really interesting to me. I doubt this is how the idea was conceived, but I think when you look at it in a particular way, it seems like a really elegant solution to an important coordination problem.
(Content note: organ trade.)
Currently, a big stumbling block with organ trade is that suppliers can only supply organs in an altruistic context because of moral intuitions about the respective sanctities of life and money; buying and selling organs is impure. This is really bad because it limits most donations to those from family members and those from people who donate their organs upon death. Family members aren’t always compatible, and organs from cadavers don’t last as long and are more likely to contain cancers. If you’re incompatible with a family member or you want to splurge on the extra expected lifespan afforded by a non-cadaveric organ, you can’t sell your organ and use the money to buy a compatible/non-cadaveric one from someone else. There seem to be a great many trades that don’t take place because of solvable spatial and temporal constraints that would be avoided by the use of a medium of exchange like money. So, the legal organ trade is relatively inefficient in most countries.
The really cynical version of the problem that you’re trying to solve, before you ever write the extremely important matchmaking algorithms that are easy to overlook from this point of view, is “How do I efficiently allocate organs without buying or selling them?” The current system of organ donation is practically a barter system, there must be a coincidence of wants between donor and recipient. So, one interpretation of what matchmaking software does is make pledges to donate organs into a medium of exchange when you can’t use the normal medium of exchange for political reasons. When you make pledges to donate into a credible signal that you will in fact donate given the satisfaction of a certain set of easily verifiable conditions, you can use that signal in place of money to make more complex trades that you couldn’t otherwise make with ‘pure barter’.
Kind of useless armchair scholarship I guess, but I thought it was elegant.
(After cursory research I lean pro-legal organ trade (something more market-like than what exists today); willing to expand on this if anyone’s interested in collecting a new contrarian opinion.)