Here's a paper reporting a "field in the lab" experiment with actual organ donor registrations, that took over ten years to get published (after considerable revision and additional data collection). But it has an important message for how to ask people to agree to donate their organs after they die, should they happen to be among those rare cases in which deceased organs can be donated. The paper has two messages: one is that it doesn't increase donor registration to ask people to answer 'yes' or 'no', compared to just asking if they want to register at this time. The second message is that people who have declined to register as a donor in the past may agree if asked again (so, don't take "no" for a final answer).
Here's the pre-publication version that will appear in AEJ:Policy.
Increasing Organ Donor Registration as a Means to Increase Transplantation: An Experiment With Actual Organ Donor Registrations by Judd B. Kessler and Alvin E. Roth, AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL: ECONOMIC POLICY (FORTHCOMING)
Abstract: The U.S. has a severe shortage of organs for transplant. Recently — inspired by research based on hypothetical choices — jurisdictions have tried to increase organ donor registrations by changing how the registration question is asked. We evaluate these changes with a novel “field-in-the-lab” experiment, in which subjects change their real organ donor status, and with new donor registration data collected from U.S. states. A “yes/no” frame is not more effective than an “opt-in” frame, contradicting conclusions based on hypothetical choices, but other question wording can matter and asking individuals to reconsider their donor status increases registrations.
And here's the blog post about and link to the 2014 NBER working paper (which was itself a revision of an earlier version), and some of the press coverage it received at the time:
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