There are now a number of ways in which an organ donation (or registration as an organ donor) can turn into a future priority for receiving an organ. Here's a paper from the January JET that looks at an overlapping generation model in which priority vouchers can be inherited by family members. The paper considers how, while this increases the incentive for the patriarch (or matriarch) of a family to register as a deceased donor, inheriting the voucher might reduce the incentive for descendants to donate, since they already have some priority on the deceased donor waiting list. The paper models how this can be avoided by giving inherited vouchers increased priority when the current recipient registers.
Organ donation with vouchers by Jaehong Kim, Mengling Li, and Menghan Xu, Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 191, January 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2020.105159
Abstract: The ever-increasing shortage of organs for transplantation has motivated many innovative policies to promote the supply of organs. This paper proposes and analyzes a general class of deceased organ allocation policies that assign priority on organ waiting lists to voucher holders to promote deceased donor registration. Priority vouchers can be obtained by self-registering for donation or through family inheritance. In an overlapping generations framework, we find that extending the donor priority benefits to future generations can improve the aggregate donation rate and social welfare. In particular, giving higher priority to voucher inheritors who register for donation is always beneficial regardless of the levels of population growth and care for future generations. By contrast, the efficacy of granting priority to nondonors with inherited vouchers depends on these two sociodemographic factors because of potential free-riding incentives.
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