title: Decision Making in Kidney Paired Donation Programs with Altruistic Donors.
abstract: In recent years, kidney paired donation (KPD) has been extended to include living non-directed or altruistic donors, in which an altruistic donor donates to the candidate of an incompatible donor-candidate pair with the understanding that the donor in that pair will further donate to the candidate of a second pair, and so on; such a process continues and thus forms an altruistic donor-initiated chain. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to sequentially allocate the altruistic donor (or bridge donor) so as to maximize the expected utility; analogous to the way a computer plays chess, the idea is to evaluate different allocations for each altruistic donor (or bridge donor) by looking several moves ahead in a derived look-ahead search tree. Simulation studies are provided to illustrate and evaluate our proposed method.
authors.forename: Yijiang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Peter X-K
authors.initials: PX
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Alan B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Leichtman
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Rees
authors.forename: John D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Kalbfleisch
keywords: Altruistic donors; decision analysis; kidney paired donation; look-ahead search tree