The Market for Blood

Bibliographic Data

ID4029026
AuthorsRobert Slonim (0000-0002-9513-4970, Professor of Economics, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.), Carmen Wang (Ph.D. student in economics, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts.), Ellen Garbarino (0000-0002-8878-3921, Professor of Marketing, University of Sydney Business School, Sydney, Australia.)
Year2014
Volume28
Issue2
Pages177-196
Publication date2014-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Economic Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0895-3309 • E-ISSN: 1944-7965
PublisherAmerican Economic Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1257/jep.28.2.177
PMID28441701
OpenAlexW2023789908
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited21

Donating blood, "the gift of life," is among the noblest activities and it is performed worldwide nearly 100 million times annually. The economic perspective presented here shows how the gift of life, albeit noble and often motivated by altruism, is heavily influenced by standard economic forces including supply and demand, economies of scale, and moral hazard. These forces, shaped by technological advances, have driven the evolution of blood donation markets from thin one-to-one "marriage markets," in which each recipient needed a personal blood donor, to thick, impersonalized, diffuse markets. Today, imbalances between aggregate supply and demand are a major challenge in blood markets, including excess supply after disasters and insufficient supply at other times. These imbalances are not unexpected given that the blood market operates without market prices and with limited storage length (about six weeks) for whole blood. Yet shifting to a system of paying blood donors seems a practical impossibility given attitudes toward paying blood donors and concerns that a paid system could compromise blood safety. Nonetheless, we believe that an economic perspective offers promising directions to increase supply and improve the supply and demand balance even in the presence of volunteer supply and with the absence of market prices

Blood supply · Business · Compromise · Economics · Excess supply · Labour economics · Market economy · Microeconomics · Supply and demand · Blood donation and transfusion practices · Law · Medicine · Organ Donation and Transplantation · Psychology of Social Influence

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