Technical Report: DCC-2014-06

Two-Player Kidney Exchange Game

Margarida Carvalho

INESC Porto and Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
e-mail: margarida.carvalho@dcc.fc.up.pt

João Pedro Pedroso

INESC Porto and Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
e-mail: {jpp}@dcc.fc.up.pt

Andrea Lodi

DEI, University of Bologna, Italy
e-mail:andrea.lodi@unibo.it

Ana Viana

INESC Porto and Instituto Superior de Engenharia, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Portugal INESC Porto and Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
e-mail: {aviana}@inescporto.pt
June 2014

Abstract

Kidney exchange programs have been set in several countries within national, regional or hospital frameworks, to increase the possibility of kidney patients being transplanted. For the case of hospital programs, it has been claimed that hospitals would benefit if they collaborated with each other, sharing their internal pools and allowing transplants involving patients of different hospitals. This claim led to the study of multi-hospital exchange markets. We propose a novel direction in this setting by modeling the exchange market as an integer programming game. The analysis of the strategic behavior of the entities participating in the kidney exchange game allowed us to prove that the most rational game outcome maximizes the social welfare and that it can be computed in polynomial time.