To benefit all participants in kidney paired donation programmes, encouraging patients to bring more donors into said programmes, thereby increasing compatibility and transplant opportunities – with greater quality and effectiveness. This is the focus of the research work – featuring INESC TEC – that received an award by the Spanish Statistics and Operations Research Society and the BBVA Foundation, for the contribution it brings to the optimisation and design of allocation rules in kidney donation programmes.
Shapley-Scarf’s definition of “Housing Markets” [1] was the starting point for this research work. Used for the allocation of indivisible goods, such as houses, this concept models a market type in which a group of people possesses goods for exchange, each with varying levels of preference regarding said resources. The goal is to establish a stable allocation of goods to individuals, preventing alliances formed by subgroups that could block this allocation, particularly those who might achieve a better outcome by joining efforts. In this context, the authors drew a parallel between home exchange markets and kidney donation programmes to understand how the donation and transplantation processes can be improved, encouraging patients to bring the most suitable set of donors to these programmes.
“We have demonstrated that, in certain types of markets, an individual benefits by bringing goods to the market that are preferred more highly by others. If we draw a parallel with paired kidney donation – where the patients are the individuals and the goods are the donors’ organs – we show that if a patient brings a donor with an organ considered to be of higher quality, the quality of the organ that the patient will receive will also be higher,” explained Xenia Klimentova and Ana Viana.
According to the INESC TEC researchers, this work demonstrated that the approach based on game theory can encourage patients to bring more donors to the kidney donation programmes, as the probability of finding a compatible donor increases with the number and quality of donors in the groups. “These results encourage the creation of a set of larger and better-quality donor-patient pairs, which ultimately benefits all patients involved,” said Xenia Klimentova and Ana Viana.
The researchers believe that the concept explored in the paper – “respecting improvement property” – is important in centralised markets where there is a direct exchange of goods, without involving a financial transaction; hence, the theoretical and computational results “may inspire further research into similar problems and have the potential to be applied to other areas”.
The paper “Shapley–Scarf housing markets: respecting improvement, integer programming, and kidney exchange“, was one of five works distinguished by the Spanish Statistics and Operations Research Society and the BBVA Foundation with the “Best applied contribution in Operations Research“ award. Xenia Klimentova and Ana Viana, INESC TEC researchers, Flip Klijn (Institute for Economic Analysis, Spanish National Research Council and the Barcelona School of Economics), and Péter Biró (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies and the Corvinus University of Budapest) are the authors of the paper – published in the journal Mathematics of Operations Research.
[1] Shapley LS, Scarf H (1974) On cores and indivisibility. J. Math. Econom. 1(1):23–37.
The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC and IPP-ISEP.
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