Allocating Scarce Organs: How a Change in Supply Affects Transplant Waiting Lists

Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the supply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of U.S. transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply induced by state-level motorcycle helmet laws, we demonstrate that each organ that becomes available from a deceased donor in a particular region induces five transplant candidates to join that region’s transplant waitlist, while crowding out living-donor transplants. Even with the corresponding demand increase, positive supply shocks increase post-transplant survival rates.