Kidney Exchange With Immunosuppressants

Professor Youngsub Chun is currently a professor of economics and the director of the Advanced Strategy Program for Global Economy at Seoul National University. He received his PhD from University of Rochester. Professor Chun previously worked at Vanderbilt University and Southern Illinois University. His research interests include Microeconomic Theory, Game Theory and Public Economics. Professor Chun has published in leading economics journals such as Econometrica, Journal of Economic Theory and Games and Economic Behavior. He has also recently published a monograph Fair Queueing (Springer, 2016) on the recent developments of the queueing problem.

Please see Prof. Chun's CV for more information.

We investigate the implications of introducing immunosuppressants to the kidney exchange problem. Immunosuppressants relax biological constraints between patients and donors, allowing patients to receive transplants from any donor. Given the limited availability, we propose how to assign immunosuppressants and how to match patients to donors to facilitate transplants. We ask whether there exist Pareto efficient solutions that satisfy additional requirements of monotonicity and maximal improvement. We propose modi?cations of the top-trading cycles solutions to achieve these requirements. To quantify the welfare improvement as per our proposal, we conduct counterfactual analyses using transplant data from South Korea. Our result suggests that the current use of immunosuppressants could have been reduced by 55 percent.