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Moral NIMBY-ism? Understanding Societal Support for Monetary Compensation to Plasma Donors in Canada
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Year: 2018 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research

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The growing demand for plasma, especially for the manufacture of therapeutic products, prompts discussions on the merits of different procurement systems. We conducted a randomized survey experiment with a representative sample of 826 Canadian residents to assess attitudes toward legalizing payments to plasma donors, a practice that is illegal in several Canadian provinces. We found no evidence of widespread societal opposition to payments to plasma donors. On the contrary, over 70% of respondents reported that they would support compensation. Our Canadian respondents were more in favor of paying plasma donors elsewhere than in Canada, but the differences were small, suggesting a weak role for moral "NIMBY-ism" or relativism. Moral concerns were the respondents' main reason for opposing payments, together with concerns for the safety of plasma from compensated donors, although most of the plasma in Canada does come from paid U.S. donors. Among those in favor of legalizing payments to donors, the main rationale was to guarantee a higher domestic supply. Finally, roughly half of those who declared to be against payments reported that they would reconsider their position if domestic supply plus imports did not cover domestic demand. Most Canadians, therefore, seem to espouse a consequentialist view on issues related to the procurement of plasma.


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Export and wages : rent sharing, workforce composition or returns to skills.
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Year: 2012 Publisher: London Centre For Economic Policy Research

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Social economics : current and emerging avenues
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ISBN: 0262337916 9780262337915 9780262035651 0262035650 0262337908 Year: 2017 Publisher: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press,

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The growing field of social economics explores how individual behavior is affected by group-level influences, extending the approach of mainstream economics to include broader social motivations and incentives. This book offers a rich and rigorous selection of current work in the field, focusing on some of the most active research areas. Topics covered include culture, gender, ethics, and philanthropic behavior. Social economics grows out of dissatisfaction with a purely individualistic model of human behavior. This book shows how mainstream economics is expanding its domain beyond market and price mechanisms to recognize a role for cultural and social factors. Some chapters, in the tradition of Gary Becker, attempt to extend the economics paradigm to explain other social phenomena; others, following George Akerlof's approach, incorporate sociological and psychological assumptions to explain economic behavior. Loosely organized by theme--Social Preferences; Culture, Values, and Norms; and Networks and Social Interactions"--The chapters address a range of subjects, including gender differences in political decisions, "moral repugnance" as a constraint on markets, charitable giving by the super-rich, value diversity within a country, and the influence of children on their parents' social networks.--


Digital
Rewarding Altruism? A Natural Field Experiment
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Year: 2011 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research

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We present evidence from a natural field experiment involving nearly 100,000 individuals on the effects of offering economic incentives for blood donations. Subjects who were offered economic rewards to donate blood were more likely to donate, and more so the higher the value of the rewards. They were also more likely to attract others to donate, spatially alter the location of their donations towards the drives offering rewards, and modify their temporal donation schedule leading to a short-term reduction in donations immediately after the reward offer was removed. Although offering economic incentives, combining all of these effects, positively and significantly increased donations, ignoring individuals who took additional actions beyond donating to get others to donate would have led to an under-estimate of the total effect, whereas ignoring the spatial effect would have led to an over-estimate of the total effect. We also find that individuals who received a reward by surprise were less likely to donate after the intervention than subjects who received no reward, suggesting that for some individuals a surprise reward adversely affected their intrinsic motivations. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding pro-social behavior.


Digital
Removing Financial Barriers to Organ and Bone Marrow Donation : The Effect of Leave and Tax Legislation in the U.S
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Year: 2012 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research

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In an attempt to alleviate the shortfall in organs and bone marrow available for transplants, many U.S. states passed legislation providing leave to organ and bone marrow donors and/or tax benefits for live and deceased organ and bone marrow donations and to employers of donors. We exploit cross-state variation in the timing and passage of such legislation to analyze its impact on organ donations by living and deceased persons, on measures of the quality of the organs transplanted, and on the number of bone marrow donations. We find that these provisions did not have a significant impact on the quantity of organs donated. The leave legislation, however, did have a positive impact on bone marrow donations. We also find some evidence of a positive impact on the quality of organ transplants, measured by post-transplant survival rates. Our results suggest that these types of legislation work for moderately invasive procedures such as bone marrow donation, but may be too low for organ donation, which is riskier and more burdensome to the donor.


Digital
Sacred Values? The Effect of Information on Attitudes toward Payments for Human Organs
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Year: 2015 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research

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Many economic transactions are prohibited--even in the absence of health or safety concerns or negative externalities--because of ethical concerns that cause these exchanges to be perceived as "repugnant" if conducted through a market. Establishing a system of payments for human organs is a particularly relevant example given its implications for public health; in almost all countries, these payments are prohibited because they are considered morally unacceptable--a prohibition that societies seem to accept despite the long waitlists and high death rates for people needing a transplant. We investigate how deeply rooted these attitudes are and, in particular, whether providing information on how a price mechanism can help alleviate the organ shortage changes people's opinions about the legalization of these transactions. We conducted a survey experiment with 3,417 subjects in the U.S. and found that providing information significantly increased support for payments for organs from a baseline of 52% to 72%, and this increase applied to most of the relevant subgroups of the analyzed sample. Additional analyses on the support for other morally controversial activities show that attitude changes in response to information depend on the type of activity under consideration and interactions with other beliefs.


Digital
Efficiency-Morality Trade-Offs in Repugnant Transactions : A Choice Experiment
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Year: 2016 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research

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Societies prohibit many transactions considered morally repugnant, although potentially efficiency-enhancing. We conducted an online choice experiment to characterize preferences for the morality and efficiency of payments to kidney donors. Preferences were heterogeneous, ranging from deontological to strongly consequentialist; the median respondent would support payments by a public agency if they increased the annual kidney supply by six percentage points, and private transactions for a thirty percentage-point increase. Fairness concerns drive this difference. Our findings suggest that cost-benefit considerations affect the acceptance of morally controversial transactions, and imply that trial studies of the effects of payments would inform the public debate.


Digital
Leveraging Patients' Social Networks to Overcome Tuberculosis Underdetection : A Field Experiment in India
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Year: 2018 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research

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Peer referrals are a common strategy for addressing asymmetric information in contexts such as the labor market. They could be especially valuable for increasing testing and treatment of infectious diseases, where peers may have advantages over health workers in both identifying new patients and providing them credible information, but they are rare in that context. In an experiment with 3,182 patients at 128 tuberculosis (TB) treatment centers in India, we find peers are indeed more effective than health workers in bringing in new suspects for testing, and low-cost incentives of about $US 3 per referral considerably increase the probability that current patients make referrals that result in the testing of new symptomatics and the identification of new TB cases. Peer outreach identifies new TB cases at 25%-35% of the cost of outreach by health workers and can be a valuable tool in combating infectious disease.


Digital
Paying for Kidneys? A Randomized Survey and Choice Experiment
Authors: --- ---
Year: 2019 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research

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Legislation and public policies are often the result of competition and compromise between different views and interests. In several cases, strongly held moral beliefs voiced by societal groups lead lawmakers to prohibit certain transactions or to prevent them from occurring through markets. However, there is limited evidence about the specific nature of the general population's opposition to using prices in such contentious transactions. We conducted a randomized survey with 2,666 American residents to study preferences for legalizing payments to kidney donors. We found strong polarization, with many participants supporting or opposing payments regardless of potential transplant gains. However, about 18 percent of respondents would switch to favoring payments for sufficiently large increases in transplants. Preferences for compensation have strong moral foundations; participants especially reject direct payments by patients, which they find would violate principles of fairness. We corroborate the interpretation of our findings with a choice experiment of a costly decision to donate money to a foundation that supports donor compensation.


Digital
The Effects of Information, Social and Economic Incentives on Voluntary Undirected Blood Donations : Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Argentina
Authors: --- --- ---
Year: 2012 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research

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In many low- and middle-income countries blood donations per capita are substantially lower than in advanced economies. In these countries blood supply is mostly collected through donations by relatives and friends of individuals needing transfusions or to replace blood used in emergencies. The World Health Organization considers this method of blood supply inefficient compared to undirected voluntary donations. To examine methods to motivate undirected voluntary donations, we ran a large-scale, natural field experiment in Argentina testing the effectiveness of information, social and economic incentives. We find that only higher-valued economic incentives generated more donations, increasing in the value of the incentive. These incentives did not create adverse selection in the safety and usability of the donated blood. We discuss the implications of our findings for researchers interested in understanding motivations for pro-social behavior and for health agencies and policymakers concerned with the current and growing shortages in blood supply in low- and middle-income countries.

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