Waitlists are often used to ration scarce resources, but the trade‐offs in designing these mechanisms depend on agents' preferences. We study equilibrium allocations under alternative designs for the deceased donor kidney waitlist. We model the decision to accept an organ or wait for a preferable one as an optimal stopping problem and estimate preferences using administrative data from the New York City area. Our estimates show that while some kidney types are desirable for all patients, there is substantial match‐specific heterogeneity in values. We then develop methods to evaluate alternative mechanisms, comparing their effects on patient welfare to an equivalent change in donor supply. Past reforms to the kidney waitlist primarily resulted in redistribution, with similar welfare and organ discard rates to the benchmark first‐come, first‐served mechanism. These mechanisms and other commonly studied theoretical benchmarks remain far from optimal. We design a mechanism that increases patient welfare by the equivalent of an 18.2% increase in donor supply.

中文翻译：

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备选候补名单设计下的平衡分配：来自已故供体肾脏的证据

候补名单通常用于分配稀缺资源，但设计这些机制时的权衡取舍取决于代理人的偏好。我们研究了已故供体肾脏候补名单在替代设计下的均衡分配。我们将接受器官或等待优选器官的决定建模为最佳停止问题，并使用来自纽约市地区的行政数据估计偏好。我们的估计表明，虽然某些肾脏类型对所有患者都是理想的，但在数值上存在显着的匹配特异性异质性。然后，我们开发了评估替代机制的方法，将它们对患者福利的影响与供体供应的等效变化进行比较。过去对肾脏候补名单的改革主要导致重新分配，福利和器官丢弃率与基准先到先得相似，优先服务机制。这些机制和其他普遍研究的理论基准仍然远非最佳。我们设计了一种机制，可以通过相当于增加 18.2% 的供体供应来增加患者福利。