Authors
Burhaneddin Sandıkçı, Lisa M Maillart, Andrew J Schaefer, Oguzhan Alagoz, Mark S Roberts
Publication date
2008/12
Journal
Operations Research
Volume
56
Issue
6
Pages
1393-1410
Publisher
INFORMS
Description
In the United States, patients with end-stage liver disease must join a waiting list to be eligible for cadaveric liver transplantation. Due to privacy concerns, the details of the composition of this waiting list are not publicly available. This paper considers the benefits associated with creating a more transparent waiting list. We study these benefits by modeling the organ accept/reject decision faced by these patients as a Markov decision process in which the state of the process is described by patient health, quality of the offered liver, and a measure of the rank of the patient in the waiting list. We prove conditions under which there exist structured optimal solutions, such as monotone value functions and control-limit optimal policies. We define the concept of the patient's price of privacy, namely, the number of expected life days lost due to the lack of complete waiting list information. We conduct extensive numerical studies …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
B Sandıkçı, LM Maillart, AJ Schaefer, O Alagoz… - Operations Research, 2008