How much is a kidney worth?
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Nice article on ‘repugnance constraint’ markets - how moral repugnance may constrain a free market and if/what should be done about it. Very interesting to me was the reference to a paper [pdf] that I tracked down. It estimates the price at which the kidney wait backlog would be eliminated if live donors were allowed to be paid (see pages 11, 12). This is for the US, and the value they come up with is $15,200 per donor. Among other things, they take into account the value of a ’statitistical life’ ($1.5 million to $10 million for an average annual income of $35000), lost wages pre/post operation, risk of death, etc.
They did not have a good way to quantify loss of quality of life (they added an arbitrary $7,500), and they did not as far as I could see, take into account the ‘repugnance factor’ of paying for an organ. Not much comfort I’m sure for all those people who are waiting for a transplant.