Payday loans (and other high interest lending) as repugnant transactions

In poor communities there is a profitable business of making very high interest rate loans to employed but "unbanked" workers. High interest rates (between lenders and apparently willing borrowers) have been repugnant transactions for a long time, and payday loans are no exception: here's a story from Pro Publica on the controversy in Missouri. The Payday Playbook: How High Cost Lenders Fight to Stay Legal

Kidney allocation changes expected by end of 2014

Kidney Allocation Changes Approved

Aug 20, 2013 | News, Unos Update

The board approved substantial amendments to OPTN policy for deceased donor kidney allocation. Implementation of the policy is expected to occur at the end of 2014.

Features of the policy include the following:

• prioritization of kidneys with longest estimated function to a limited number of candidates expected to benefit the longest
• wider geographic allocation of kidneys with shorter potential function, to increase utilization for candidates facing a significant mortality risk remaining on dialysis long-term
• definition of waiting time expanded to include time a patient spent on dialysis prior to waiting list registration
• a sliding scale of priority for candidates with high PRA, as well as matching of blood subtype A2 and A2B offers for candidates with blood type B, and
• elimination of the kidney payback system and existing kidney allocation variances.

- See more at: http://transplantpro.org/kidney-allocation-changes-approved/#sthash.lbHqfgWL.dpuf

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Some background on the origins of this policy change are in this Oct 2012 post.

The econometrics of many-to-one matching: Nikhil Agarwal and William Diamond

It turns out that you can get a lot more information about preferences from many to one (or many to many) matching than from one to one matching, because e.g. something about your employer's preferences (and why they wanted to hire you) can be deduced from who else they hired.

IDENTIFICATION AND ESTIMATION IN TWO-SIDED MATCHING MARKETS 
By Nikhil Agarwal and William Diamond

Abstract: We study estimation and non-parametric identification of preferences in two-sided matching markets using data from a single market with many agents. We consider a model in which preferences of each side of the market is homogeneous, utility is nontransferable utility and the observed matches are pairwise stable. We show that preferences are not identified with data on one-to-one matches but are non-parametrically identified when data from many-to-one matches are observed. This difference in the identifiability of the model is illustrated by comparing two simulated objective functions, one that does and the other that does not use information available in many-to-one matching. We also prove consistency of a method of moments estimator for a parametric model under a data generating process in which the size of the matching market increases, but data only on one market is observed. Since matches in a single market are interdependent, our proof of consistency cannot rely on observations of independent matches. Finally, we present Monte Carlo studies of a simulation based estimator.


Here's my post on Nikhil's defense.

Advice to those seeking a kidney donor

I occasionally get emails from kidney patients seeking advice about transplantation. Often they are seeking a donor. I don't have much help to offer when I correspond with them, but perhaps the generic form of my response will be useful to others. I'm assuming in what follows that the advice is for a kidney patient who is already registered on the deceased donor waiting list and with an American hospital that does a lot of kidney transplants.

Sometimes people write to me with questions related to kidney exchange, on aspects of which I've written many blog posts. For someone who is looking for a living donor, kidney exchange means that the donor you find needn't be compatible with you, he or she simply needs to be healthy enough to donate a kidney, and willing to donate one so that you get one. One of the several kidney exchange networks can take it from there; it is probably best to work with the one that your transplant center has the easiest working relations with, although you can find the links to the ones I work with the most as you sort through my posts.

When I write to someone who already has a donor I write more than this about kidney exchange, but if you don't have a donor, you need to think about how to get one.

If you are not already registered on the deceased donor waiting list, talk to your docs about getting on the list, since time on the list plays an important role for kidneys.  But the waiting lists are organized by region, and the wait is much longer in some regions of the country than in others. (That's why Steve Jobs, who lived in California, got a liver transplant in Tennessee.)

A new organization that helps people register on the waiting lists of regions where the wait is shorter (even if that isn't where the patient lives) is OrganJet (which I've blogged about here). They are mostly involved in helping arrange transportation (since you have to be able to travel for checkups etc. at the distant hospital at which you are registered in addition to your local hospital). But their website has an app that identifies transplant centers with  shorter waiting times, and that might be a good way to start, since this is a case in which there may be a conflict of interest between you and your local transplant center.

But a living donor is likely better as well as quicker, if you can find one. Here's a link suggesting how to organize a campaign for a living donor:
 Living Kidney Donor Network founded by Harvey Mysel.

There are various kinds of kidney matchmaking sites, like matchingdonors.com, and more specialized sites like http://www.kidneymitzvah.com/ and Renewal.
My impression is that quite a few donors come from faith based organizations, so if you are a member of some kind of congregation, you might let them know of your search for a donor.

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There are other options that I don't recommend, but here's a post with a link to an article by the Harvard Law professor Glenn Cohen that seeks to shed some light on overseas markets for kidneys, some less black than others.

Glenn Cohen on Transplant Tourism: purchasing organ transplants internationally

(There's a legal market for kidneys in Iran, but I believe you have to be an Iranian citizen to participate in it.)

Is market design like synthetic biology?

Synthetic biology is concerned with the creation of new kinds of cells and organisms, and an interesting blog post by the economic sociologist/sociologist of science Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra at LSE riffs on some possible connections between synthetic biology and market design: Will the Real Engineers Please Stand Up

He concludes:

"Talking with the language of design provides, as Martha Poon rightly pointed out, a more productive approach to the study of markets. But it also makes possible imagining a bolder version of market design than that currently advocated within economics. While the markets created by Roth and Milgrom are truly feats, much more can be done. Indeed, market design need not be a type of ‘consultancy economics’. Rather, it can follow an alternative metaphor that is pragmatic, perhaps even civic, an image of the future closer to that of the (biological) engineers who today work away in their labs redesigning the fundamental building blocks of nature."

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Pardo-Guerra is working in the emerging sociological/science-studies tradition of "performativity". Here's his paper Making markets: infrastructures, engineers and the moral technologies of finance which tracks the development of electronic financial exchanges through the electronic order book:

"How do markets change? Conventional sociological accounts answer this question by stressing the weight of social structures on the transactional core of  the marketplace. This paper provides an alternative approach. Market change is identified as an infrastructural transformation in which novel market devices and classifications are defined as the legitimate platforms for exchange. Rather than focusing on the traditional subjects of sociological enquiry, this study looks at the developers of market infrastructures in order to appraise the evolution and reinvention of markets. Empirically, the paper focuses on four historical episodes relating to the invention and dissemination of the electronic order book, a device that is central to global financial capitalism. These show how infrastructural work was implicated in creating the politics and structures of modern finance by criticising established institutions, mounting competitive challenges against incumbent institutions, establishing expansive projects of marketization and integrating otherwise disconnected marketplaces."
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He also has coauthored an interesting looking paper on high frequency trading (that I haven't yet read, only the abstract is on his site):  Drilling Through the Allegheny Mountains: Liquidity, Materiality and High Frequency Trading

(it will be interesting to compare the work of economic sociologists with that of market designers on this topic, see e.g. this recent post Budish, Cramton and Shim on The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race)
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He and his colleagues seem to be bringing some thought about market design into the discussion of the sociology of markets.

Citation collaboration

"Impact factors" have become important to journals, and efforts to manipulate them come to light from time to time. Here's a Brazilian story from the journal Nature: Brazilian citation scheme outed
Thomson Reuters suspends journals from its rankings for ‘citation stacking’.

"Mauricio Rocha-e-Silva thought that he had spotted an easy way to raise the profiles of Brazilian journals. From 2009, he and several other editors published articles containing hundreds of references to papers in each others’ journals — in order, he says, to elevate the journals’ impact factors.

"Because each article avoided citing papers published by its own journal, the agreement flew under the radar of analyses that spot extremes in self-citation — until 19 June, when the pattern was discovered. Thomson Reuters, the firm that calculates and publishes the impact factor, revealed that it had designed a program to spot concentrated bursts of citations from one journal to another, a practice that it has dubbed ‘citation stacking’. Four Brazilian journals were among 14 to have their impact factors suspended for a year for such stacking. And in July, Rocha-e-Silva was fired from his position as editor of one of them, the journal Clinics, based in São Paulo."

Are behavioral results more likely to be exaggerated than biological results?

That's the claim (reported in the blog Retraction Watch) of

"a new paper in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that it’s behavioral science researchers in the U.S. who are more likely to exaggerate or cherry-pick their findings.

For the new paper, Daniele Fanelli — whose 2009 paper in PLoS ONE contains some of the best data on the prevalence of misconduct — teamed up with John Ioannidis, well known for his work on “why most published research findings are false.” They looked at

1,174 primary outcomes appearing in 82 metaanalyses published in health-related biological and behavioral research sampled from the Web of Science categories Genetics & Heredity and Psychiatry and measured how individual results deviated from the overall summary effect size within their respective meta-analysis.

And while studies

whose outcome included behavioral parameters were generally more likely to report extreme effects, and those with a corresponding author based in the US were more likely to deviate in the direction predicted by their experimental hypotheses, particularly when their outcome did not include additional biological parameters.

But they didn’t find the same to be true for non-behavioral studies.

Although this latter finding could be interpreted as a publication bias against non-US authors, the US effect observed in behavioral research is unlikely to be generated by editorial biases. Behavioral studies have lower methodological consensus and higher noise, making US researchers potentially more likely to express an underlying propensity to report strong and significant findings.

So where might this predisposition come from, ask the authors?

A complete explanation would probably invoke a combination of cultural, economic, psychological, and historical factors, which at this stage are largely speculative. Our preferred hypothesis is derived from the fact that researchers in the United States have been exposed for a longer time than those in other countries to an unfortunate combination of pressures to publish and winner-takes-all system of rewards (20, 22). This condition is believed to push researchers into either producing many results and then only publishing the most impressive ones, or to make the best of what they got by making them seem as important as possible, through post hoc analyses, rehypothesizing, and other more or less questionable practices (e.g., 10, 13, 22, 26). Such a pattern of modulating forces may gradually become more prevalent also in other countries currently and in the near future (18, 20, 21)."

...
"And Fanelli was also quick to point out that this kind of exaggeration doesn’t seem to be exclusive to the U.S.

The US are an ideal subject because they are relatively homogeneous and yet very big and scientifically productive, so it was easy for us to compare the US to the rest of the world. And of course the US-effect was especially interesting, since it helped us exclude classic explanations, such as editorial biases and simple file-drawer effects. But we suspect that with higher statistical power we would observe specific biases in other countries, in Europe and elsewhere, possibly limited to specific fields and periods in time.

Before opening the floor to what we hope will be a robust discussion, we’ll close with lovely description of science that opens the paper:

Science is a struggle for truth against methodological, psychological, and sociological obstacles."

German kidney transplant surgeon on trial

Prosecutors in Germany have accused a transplant surgeon of attempted murder, for allegedly manipulating the waiting list to obtain organs for his patients, and thus victimizing those who should have been ahead of them in line to receive the organs in question

Google translate renders the headline as "He killed without being a murderer"

"The surgeon Ayman O. is on trial. He is said to have manipulated information to patients to transplant organs to them. The prosecution sees this as attempted murder, he had taken the death of the other into account. The process in Göttingen will make the system of organ allocation to the test."

HT: Rosemarie Nagel

In Taiwan, most registered organ donors are women

Women far more willing to donate organs, numbers show

"Taipei, Aug. 25 (CNA) Of the 620,000 people on Taiwan's organ donation list, 65 percent are women, which one expert says proves woman have bigger hearts than men.

"Wu Ying-lai, secretary general of the Republic of China Organ Procurement Association, made the remarks as her association released a report on trends in local organ donation to mark its 20th anniversary on Sunday.

"The trend is more pronounced in the largest demographic of organ donors, those aged 21-50, which features 2.2 times more women than men, Wu said, based on an analysis of the 223,250 people who have signed up for the national organ donation program in the past 10 years.

"Looking at the data more closely, the largest groups of donors are women aged 31-40, followed by women aged 41-50, women aged 21-30, men aged 31-40, and men aged 41-50, she noted."

A sociologist looks at the design of electricity capacity markets

The discussion among sociologists of the "performativity" of economics is taking more sophisticated note of market design.  Here's a recent paper from the journal Social Studies of Science.

Designing a market-like entity: Economics in the politics of market formation
Daniel Breslau
Department of Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Abstract: Recent work on the relationship of economics to economic institutions has argued that economics is constitutive of economic institutions, and of markets in particular. In opposition to economic sociology, which has treated economics as a competing disciplinary frame or an ideology, the ‘performativity’ literature takes economics seriously as a set of market-building practices. This
article demonstrates the compatibility of these perspectives by analyzing the role of economics
in the politics of market formation. It presents a case study of the formation of a new institution:
capacity markets connected to wholesale electricity markets in the United States. The case
demonstrates how economic framing shapes the politics of markets by imposing a specific set of
terms for the legitimate conduct of the struggle over market rules.

Project Renewal: Kidney donation in faith-based communities

It appears that many American non-directed kidney donors (perhaps a third, judging from informal evidence from the programs with which I deal) come from faith-based communities. (I understand that policemen and firemen are also well represented among nondirected donors.) Non-directed donors are particularly important because they can initiate chains of donations among patient-donor pairs waiting for kidney exchange.

A Jewish organization that has contributed many non-directed donors is Renewal, founded by Mendy Reiner.

Here's an article about Renewal, by Rabbi Boruch Wolf, which focuses on the big effect of these living donors from the religious Jewish community, and contrasts it with the reluctance of members of that community to sign deceased-donor registration cards, because of concerns among other things about what is involved in deciding that someone is deceased.
Do Chareidim Contribute Their ‘Fair Share’ of Organs?

Kidney transplantation in Nepal

From (the blog) The Kidney Doctor, comes these remarks and links on kidney transplantation in Nepal. They surely apply to other countries as well, since many countries have laws against living donor transplants from unrelated donors.

The first kidney transplant program in Nepal was launched in 2009 by Dr. Dibya Singh Shah at Tribhuban University Teaching Hospital (TUTH) with the help of an Australian transplant surgeon. Over 200 transplants have been performed, but these are exclusively living related. Launching and maintaining a quality kidney transplantation has been a heroic effort on the part of Dr. Dibya Singh. Many in her place would probably not pulled off what she has done. 

However, more needs to be done. No living unrelated transplants are allowed under Nepalese law and there is no deceased donor program. 

 The government of Nepal needs to change it's policy on unrelated donor transplantation. By not allowing this to happen, a sizable number of patients are denied the opportunity of receiving a transplant and a new lease on life. It is a pity that the price of avoiding a small number of bad actors doing commercially motivated transplantation in Nepal means patients who have an unrelated donor being unable to undergo transplantation. It doesn't seem either feasible or sensible to limit a whole country to an approach that is essentially driven by fear. 

Ashlagi and Shi on community cohesion in school choice

Itai Ashlagi and Peng Shi have a paper motivated by some of the recent discussions of school choice in Boston:

Improving Community Cohesion in School Choice via Correlated-Lottery Implementation
Itai Ashlagi and Peng Shi
Draft Date: August 6, 2013

Abstract:
In school choice, children submit a preference ranking over schools to a centralized assignment algorithm, which takes into account schools’ priorities over children and uses randomization to break ties. One criticism of current school choice mechanisms is that they tend to disperse communities so children do not go to school with others from their neighborhood.
We suggest to improve community cohesion by implementing a correlated lottery in a given school choice mechanism: we find a convex combination of deterministic assignments that maintains the original assignment probabilities, thus maintaining choice, but yields increased cohesion.

To analyze the gain in cohesion for a wide class of mechanisms, we first prove the following characterization which maybe of independent interest: any mechanism which, in the large market limit, is non-atomic, Bayesian incentive compatible, symmetric and efficient within each priority class, is a “lottery-plus-cutoff” mechanism. This means that the large market limit can be described as follows: given the distribution of preferences, every student receives an identically distributed lottery number, every school sets a lottery cutoff for each priority class, and a student is assigned her most preferred school for which she meets the cutoff. This generalizes Liu and Pycia (2012) to allow arbitrary priorities. Using this, we derive analytic expressions for maximum cohesion under a large market approximation. We show that the benefit of lottery-correlation is greater when students’ preferences are more correlated.

In practice, although the correlated-lottery implementation problem is NP-hard, we present a heuristic that does well. We apply this to real data from Boston elementary school choice 2012 and find that we can increase cohesion by 79% for K1 and 37% for K2 new families. Greater cohesion gain is possible (tripling cohesion for K1 and doubling for K2) if we apply lottery-correlation on top of reducing the choice menu (to what was eventually adopted by Boston after the 2012-2013 school choice reform). This has minimal impact on racial or socio-economic diversity.

Sex trafficking from Nepal to India

This story from the NY Times reports on sex trafficking in which at least some women are kidnapped and involuntarily sold to brothels: Women, Bought and Sold in Nepal.

"Although reliable data on the scope of the issue is difficult to gather, Unicef reports that as many as 7,000 women and girls are trafficked out of Nepal to India every year, and around 200,000 are now working in Indian brothels."
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Market designers spend a lot of our time trying to make failed markets succeed, but this kind of thing is a reminder that many markets succeed so well that even making them illegal isn't sufficient to make them fail. I don't know enough about this particular market, but in general we might spend some time thinking on how to make illegal markets fail...

NBER Market Design conference at Stanford, Oct 25 (and 26)

Below is the announcement, from Susan Athey and Parag Pathak. Although the conference is at Stanford, I won't be able to attend because it conflicts with the ESA meetings at which I was already scheduled to speak. But come if you can, Stanford is lovely in the Fall.

From: Susan Athey and Parag Pathak

To: NBER Market Design Working Group

The National Bureau of Economic Research workshop on Market Design is a forum to discuss new academic research related to the design of market institutions, broadly defined. The next meeting will be held in Stanford, California on Friday, October 25, 2013.

We welcome new and interesting research, and are happy to see papers from a variety of fields. Participants in the past meeting covered a range of topics and methodological approaches.  Last year's program can be viewed at: http://conference.nber.org/confer/2012/MDf12/program.html

The conference does not publish proceedings or issue NBER working papers - most of the presented papers are presumed to be published later in journals.

There is no requirement to be an NBER-affiliated researcher to participate.  Younger researchers are especially encouraged to submit papers.  If you are interested in presenting a paper this year, please upload a PDF version by September 2, 2013 to this link:

http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf13

Preference will be given to papers for which at least a preliminary draft is ready by the time of submission. Only authors of accepted papers will be contacted.

For presenters and discussants in North America, the NBER will cover the travel and hotel costs. For speakers from outside North America, while the NBER will not be able to cover the airfare, it can provide support for hotel accommodation.

There are a limited number of spaces available for graduate students to attend the conference, though we cannot cover their costs. Please email ppathak@mit.edu a short nominating paragraph.

Please forward this announcement to any potentially interested scholars.  We look forward to hearing from you.

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Updated: it will be a two day conference, Oct 25-26 (so it exactly overlaps with the ESA meetings:(
Here is the program

Double blind reviewing

"Double blind reviewing" is the practice in some academic journals of not only concealing the reviewers' identities from the authors, but of also concealing the authors' identities from the reviewers. The idea is that papers should be evaluated "on their own merits," without information about the authors. The controversies that arise have to do with whether there is valuable information in knowing who the authors are.  For a number of years the American Economic Review tried to have double blind reviewing (that was somewhat undermined by the growing ease of finding papers on the internet), but they abandoned this practice a few years ago.

I was reminded of this by the story of J.K. Rowling's (of Harry Potter fame) venture into publishing a story under a pseudonym, later revealed...

‘Cuckoo’s Calling’ Reveals Long Odds for New Authors

"“The Cuckoo’s Calling” became the publishing sensation of the summer when word leaked that its first-time author, Robert Galbraith, was none other than J. K. Rowling, the mega-best-selling creator of Harry Potter.

"Mystery solved? Maybe not. It’s no surprise that “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a detective story set in a London populated by supermodels and rock stars, shot to the top of best-seller lists once the identity of the author was revealed. But if the book is as good as critics are now saying it is, why didn’t it sell more copies before, especially since the rise of online publishing has supposedly made it easier than ever for first-time authors?"

Fading repugnance watch: Marijuana and same sex marriage

Two stories in yesterday's NY Times were about repugnant transactions that are in the process of becoming less repugnant:

U.S. Says It Won’t Sue to Undo State Marijuana Laws
"The Obama administration on Thursday said it would not sue to undo laws legalizing marijuana in 20 states, although it will monitor operations in those states to make sure they do not run afoul of several enforcement priorities."

I.R.S. to Recognize All Gay Marriages, Regardless of State
"All legally married same-sex couples will be recognized for federal tax purposes, regardless of whether the state where they live recognizes the marriage, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday."

Wagaroo update: designing a mechanism to identify responsible sources for pet dogs

In February, Christine Exley, a graduate student in economics at Stanford, introduced us to Wagaroo, a new market for pets, here. Since then, she has developed an interesting new mechanism to screen out puppy mills from her Owner Rehoming Program. Her Owner Rehoming Program is also serving as a substitute for animal shelters for some dogs.   As Wagaroo expands she and her colleagues hope this will help drive down the animal shelter population. (You can hear her in the last link below, a video...)  

She writes:

"Wagaroo makes it easy for people to find dogs from ethical sources.  We only post dogs from the shelters, rescues, responsible breeders, and families needing to rehome their dogs.  Dogs are adopted from the last group via our Owner Rehoming Program, which involves owners who need to find new loving homes for their dogs due to a variety of reasons, such as a death in the family, financial challenges, or having to move.  By using our Owner Rehoming Program, these owners keep their dogs until they find a new family for their dog – that is, they keep their dogs out of animal shelters.

"When we were developing our Owner Rehoming Program, we wanted to develop a system that keeps out puppy mills, places that cruelly mass-produce puppies in horrid conditions.   To do so, we thought of a mechanism that aligns incentives.  To illustrate, lets assume Alice wants to adopt a dog from Bob through our Owner Rehoming Program.   To finalize the adoption, Wagaroo asks Alice to pay a $100 adoption fee to Wagaroo, 50% of which is donated to a local animal shelter.  

"How does this keep out puppy mills?   First, Bob does not receive any money for his dog, so he clearly is not a puppy mill trying to make money by selling dogs.  Since Alice does not want a dog from a puppy mill, we can rely on her to not pay Bob.   Second, Bob wants to avoid problems that can arise when giving away dogs for free, such as them being used in dog fights or other cruel ways.   Because of this, we can rely on Bob making sure Alice pays the adoption fee to Wagaroo. This aligns incentives well, and the system is working wonderfully so far!

"If you would like to support our cause, please join in our crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo. You may also learn more about the economics behind Wagaroo in this video!"

Tourism pricing at the Jaipur observatory

Here's the price list...

And well worth it, to see a sculpture garden of assorted sundials of varying sophistication:

Why it's hard to reimburse non-directed kidney donors for their travel costs

A letter to the editor of the American Journal of Transplantation:

To the Editor:

We are responding to the Melcher et al. [1] article, which recommends that the National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC) pay for travel and lodging for nondirected donors (NDDs). We commend the work done by this group of stakeholders and believe the publishing of their findings is vital to improving the process of kidney paired donation. We do, however, need to clarify one point in their many important recommendations.

The article recommends “The National Living Donor Assistance Center should provide travel and lodging expenses to the NDD.” It is important to note that there are limits to the NLDAC program that were put in place by the U.S. Congress. NLDAC cannot pay for the travel and lodging expenses for all NDDs. The Organ Donation Recovery and Improvement Act (ODRIA) [2] established the legislative parameters for NLDAC. ODRIA states that individuals may not receive compensation from the grant if these expenses can reasonably be paid by a State or Federal program, an insurance company or the recipient of the organ. ODRIA requires means testing of the recipient's household income.

In practice, this means a recipient must be identified before an application can be filed with NLDAC. Because NDDs do not have a recipient identified before their evaluation trip to transplant center, NLDAC cannot reimburse those expenses. However, after a recipient is identified, a NLDAC application may then be filed. It should be noted that NLDAC received 42 applications between 2008 and 2012 for NDD, of which 32 were approved, providing NDDs with reimbursement of travel expenses through NLDAC.

If the recipient's household income is below the income threshold of 300% of the HHS Poverty Guidelines, NLDAC is allowed to reimburse those donor's expenses for the surgery and medical follow-up trips. If the recipient's income is above the income threshold, NLDAC may reimburse the donor's expenses if financial hardship is proven by the recipient. If the application is not approved, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) [3] allows the recipient to reimburse the donor's expenses.

Lastly, we agree with the article's recommendation that payers should cover donor travel and lodging costs given that, by donating and traveling, the donor is enabling not only the recipient's transplant, but also those of other recipients.

This letter represents the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the grant funder.

A. O. Ojo1*, R. M. Merion2, D. H. Howard3 and P. H. Warren4
1Division of Nephrology, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
2Division of Transplantation, Department of Surgery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
3Department of Health Policy and Management, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
4National Living Donor Assistance Center, American Society of Transplant Surgeons, Arlington, Virginia
*Corresponding author: Akinlolu Ojo, aojo@med.umich.edu
 The letter is found under the heading
Response to “Dynamic Challenges Inhibiting Optimal Adoption of Kidney Paired Donation: Findings of a Consensus Conference” by Melcher et al.
American Journal of Transplantation, Volume 13, Issue 8, page 2228, August 2013