This award funds a project that uses three different research methods to analyze why people donate bone marrow and how donors are matched with recipients.
The biology of the human immune system means that most people who need a marrow donation cannot look to immediate family for a donor match. Therefore, registering as a potential marrow donor is a largely altruistic act. Anyone who chooses to register knows that the likely beneficiary will be a stranger. This altruistic act comes at significant non-monetary costs; marrow donors must undergo a painful and invasive medical procedure.
Existing theories of altruism in economics and decision science do not predict what we observe when we look at decisions to register as a marrow donor. International comparisons show that there are significant differences across countries in the percentage of citizens who register. This project uses economic theory, decision-making experiments, and international attitude surveys to determine the causes of these differences.
The project also includes a study of global cooperation between donor registries. Most developed countries operate some sort of national registry, so it is relatively easy to search within a country for donor/recipient matches. However, there are good genetic reasons to search around the globe for matches. This is especially true for the United States, a genetically diverse country. American citizens in need of a marrow donation may find their best matches abroad. For this reason, global cooperation across marrow registries is important. However, such global cooperation creates an incentive for small homogenous countries to free ride on the investments of large diverse countries such as the U.S. A small nation may prefer to spend little money on donor registration, thinking that it can draw on the large US pool of potential donors to meet citizen needs. The project will analyze the incentives for global cooperation and develop new ideas to encourage such cooperation.
