Outcomes and the Value of Choice in Assignment Problems

该奖项资助经济学领域的研究，这些研究将开发和使用新方法来评估现有匹配系统的结果。该项目还将为如何设计这样的系统以满足社会目标提供新的见解。这项研究的重点是可以改进美国和世界各地管理已故捐赠者器官捐赠的方法的想法。该项目还将评估美国用来匹配捐赠器官和接受者的系统最近发生变化的影响。捐赠的器官是一种稀缺资源；仅在美国，2019年每天就有大约22人在等待肾脏移植时死亡。这意味着，了解当前方法的效果并开发可能的改进措施可以拯救生命。新方法还可以应用于评估并可能改进许多其他系统的有效性，这些系统用于匹配人与机会。例如，一些公立学校系统使用这些想法将学生分配到特定的学校。该项目有几个目标。第一是制定可用来衡量各种分配制度在这些重要成果上的业绩的方法。建议的方法是基于结合结果数据和配对过程的管理数据来估计不同匹配对感兴趣的结果的影响，例如，从不同类型的已故供者向不同类型的患者移植肾脏的影响。研究人员将使用匹配系统产生的准实验变化来估计这些影响。第二个目标是应用这些方法来研究来自已故捐赠者和肾衰竭患者的不同类型的肾脏之间的不同类型的匹配对寿命的影响。该项目的这一部分改进了目前的方法，即使用观察性方法来估计肾移植的终生年收益。第三个目标是了解匹配系统中的选择如何与这些感兴趣的结果相关。大多数匹配机制通常会给患者提供很大程度的选择。病人和外科医生可以接受或拒绝器官捐赠；学生可以对学校进行排名，公共住房申请者可以申请部分住房单元。我们的目标是了解参与这些机制的人做出的选择在多大程度上与最大化结果保持一致，例如对肾病患者的生存影响或对学生的测试分数影响。最终目的是利用这些发现来评估现有的匹配系统并设计新的系统。此外，该计划还将量化为代理商提供选择的价值。例如，可以使用分配系统来引导患者和他们的外科医生选择特别适合他们但对其他人几乎没有价值的肾脏。沿着这些维度改进设计可以对患者的健康和生存产生重大影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award funds research in economics that will develop and employ new methods to evaluate the results of existing matching systems. The project will also provide new insights into how to design such systems to meet societal goals. The research focuses on ideas that could improve the methods used in the U.S. and around the world to manage organ donations from deceased donors. The project will also evaluate the effects of recent changes to the system used in the U.S. to match donated organs to recipients. Donated organs are a scarce resource; in the U.S. alone approximately 22 people died each day in 2019 while waiting for a kidney transplant. This means that understanding the effects of current methods and the development of possible improvements could save lives. The new methods can also be applied to evaluate and possibly improve the effectiveness of many other systems that are used to match people to opportunities. For example, some public school systems use these ideas to place students in specific schools. The project has several goals. The first is to develop methods that can be used to measure the performance of various assignment systems on these important outcomes. The proposed methods are based on combining data on outcomes and administrative data on the matching process to estimate the effects of various matches on the outcomes of interest, for example, the effects transplanting kidneys from different types of deceased donor to various patient types. The researchers will use quasi-experimental variation generated by the matching system to estimate these effects. The second goal is to apply these methods to study the life-year effects of different types of matches between different types of kidneys from deceased donors and patients with kidney failure. This part of the project improves on the current approach that uses an observational approach to estimate life-year benefits from kidney transplantation. The third goal is to understand how choices in a matching system relate to these outcomes of interest. Most matching mechanisms typically give patients a significant degree of choice. Patients and surgeons can accept or refuse an organ offer; students get to rank schools, and public housing applicants may apply to a subset of housing units. The goal is to understand the extent to which the people participating in these mechanisms make choices that are aligned with maximizing the outcomes such as survival effects in the case of kidney patients or test-score effects in the case of students. The final aim is to use these findings to evaluate existing matching systems and to design new systems. Moreover, the plan is to quantify the value of providing choice to agents. For example, it may be possible to use the assignment system to steer patients and their surgeons towards choosing the kidneys that are particularly well suited to them,but have little value for others. Improving the design along these dimensions can have a significant impact on patient health and survival.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.