Join us in welcoming Sait Tunc, an assistant professor from Virginia Tech, as he discusses industrial engineering topics. Alums and friends of the program are always welcome.
Targeted Priority Mechanisms in Transplantation: Incentivizing, Not Enforcing, Efficient Matching of Organs
The persistent imbalance between organ supply and demand poses a significant challenge for the life-saving treatment of transplantation. This study introduces innovative targeted priority mechanisms inspired by the Eurotransplant Senior Program (ESP), designed to bridge the supply-demand gap while optimizing the matching between organs and recipients without mandating offer acceptance. These mechanisms diverge from traditional prioritization by offering voluntary participation and granting explicit priority to disadvantaged patients for a specified range of organs provided they restrict their offer acceptance to this set. Using a comprehensive queueing model, our study analyzes the strategic decisions of waitlisted candidates under targeted priority mechanisms in equilibrium, establishing the optimal program design. Our findings reveal the capacity of these mechanisms to separate organ allocation across different patient classes, improving overall system efficiency. Our evaluation of these mechanisms’ impact on social welfare underscores their potential to improve overall welfare without adversely affecting any patient group. The practical applicability and impact of these mechanisms are demonstrated through a case study within the U.S. kidney allocation system using a clinically detailed simulation model, targeting elderly patients aged 65 and above. Simulation outcomes reveal a significant participation rate (80.5%) even when the program offers priority over kidneys that are conventionally perceived as marginal. Furthermore, our findings highlight the mechanisms’ potential to increase yearly transplants by 1,000 and prevent up to 200 waitlist deaths annually. Improvements in the outcomes of even nonelderly patients highlight the mechanisms’ potential to comprehensively address organ underutilization and improve organ-recipient matching in a real-world context.
Sait Tunc is an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017 and subsequently spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Dr. Tunc’s research focuses on theoretical problems driven by real-world applications, particularly in healthcare systems. Utilizing large-scale datasets, he aims to develop data-driven solutions to improve medical decision-making and operational efficiency. His recent work addresses operational challenges in organ transplantation, including designing incentive mechanisms to reduce organ wastage and improve allocation efficiency, studying the problem of systematic gaming in heart transplantation, and developing innovative risk prediction models, ranking algorithms, and detailed simulation models for U.S. organ transplant systems. Additionally, he researches strategies for infectious disease mitigation by integrating incentive mechanisms into screening and vaccination efforts. His research is supported by an NSF CAREER Award.
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