Help People Understand the Benefits of Donation.

• Author: Macis, Mario

In a 2020 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article, Alvin Roth and Stephanie Wang observe that both markets and bans on markets require social support to be effective. For example, if a particular transaction is banned but a sufficient share of the population does not find it "repugnant," a black market might develop or people might travel to other jurisdictions or countries where the exchange is legal.

Roth and Wang study popular attitudes in Germany, Spain, the Philippines, and the United States toward three morally controversial markets: prostitution, surrogacy, and Global Kidney Exchange (GKE). In some cases, they find a disconnect between popular opinions and regulation: support for commercial surrogacy and GKE is above 60% in all four countries, including those where the law prohibits the practices. In contrast, popular support for legalized prostitution is strong where the practice is legal (Germany) and weak in the countries studied without legal prostitution.

The examination of attitudes about a particular issue is helpful because it can give a sense of the type of pressure the public might exert on policymakers, and how that might shape future legislative or regulatory changes. Based on their survey results, Roth and Wang suggest that for surrogacy and kidney exchange, we are likely to see more (and more successful) efforts to remove restrictions where they are currently illegal.

Americans and kidney donation compensation / The National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984 prohibits donors from receiving "valuable consideration" for organs to be used for transplantation. But what do Americans think about paying organ donors? Julio Elias of Argentina's Universidad del CEMA, Nicola Lacetera of the University of Toronto, and I investigated this question in a 2019 study published in the American Economic Review. In our research, we assessed the attitude of Americans toward different forms of compensation for living kidney donors under various institutional arrangements and hypotheses regarding their effects on the availability of kidneys for transplant (and thus on lives saved). We conducted an experimental survey with more than 2,500 participants whose main demographic characteristics matched, on average, those of the overall U.S. population.

We find that:

* Attitudes toward compensating kidney donors depend on both ethical considerations and the effect on reducing the nation's kidney shortage.

* Support for...