In familiar terms, think of market designer as the engineer behind intricate market systems. We design Tinder’s two-sided dating market that match you with your next ‘swipe’, or, Google’s ads market that decides which ads to recommend to you in your next search. And here is the contribution of market designers that I’m most proud of—as a member of the community—kidney exchange.
Kidney disease is one of the top 10 causes of death in the US and around the world. And the treatment of choice is transplantation. We can keep people alive for a while on dialysis. But, that’s not the same as a cure.
And kidneys are unusual because healthy people have two and can remain healthy with one. So it’s possible to get a kidney donation, not just from a dead person, which is where we commonly get donor hearts from, but also from a living person. So someone might love you enough to give you a kidney if you needed one.
But it’s not so simple, someone could love you enough to give you a kidney, but you wouldn’t be able to take their kidney. Even if they’re healthy enough to give someone a kidney, they might not be able to give it to you.
So sometimes there are these incompatible patient donor pairs—which means that there’s someone who loves you and wants to give you a kidney, but they can’t give it to you. And there might be someone who loves me and wants to give me a kidney, but can’t give it to me. But maybe my intended donor could give you a kidney and your intended donor could give me a kidney. And if we can arrange those exchanges, which is things that economists do, we could get more living donor transplants and save more lives.
And this is where exchange happen. Economy people cares more about how potentially strategic patient donor pairs interact in this exchange market. Computer scientists are more concerned about how to design algorithms to make the market actually work.
Holding the algorithmic tools in my hand while looking at these economic problems, a good market designer need to be sensitive to cultural and psychological factors to better understand the incentives and constraints that people face. And this is what I am committed to becoming.