Fairness Without Discrimination: Individually Fair Outcomes in the Kidney Exchange Problem

Published Online:https://doi.org/10.1287/deca.2025.0430

References

  • Abraham DJ, Blum A, Sandholm T (2007) Clearing algorithms for barter exchange markets: Enabling nationwide kidney exchanges. Proc. Eighth ACM Conf. Electronic Commerce (Association for Computing Machinery, New York), 295–304.Google Scholar
  • Arslan AN, Omer J, Yan F (2024) Kidneyexchange.jl: A Julia package for solving the kidney exchange problem with branch-and-price. Math. Programming Comput. 16(1):151–184.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Ashlagi I, Roth AE (2021) Kidney exchange: An operations perspective. Management Sci. 67(9):5455–5478.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Ashlagi I, Jaillet P, Manshadi VH (2013) Kidney exchange in dynamic sparse heterogenous pools. Preprint, submitted January 15, https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3509.Google Scholar
  • Ashlagi I, Burq M, Jaillet P, Manshadi V (2019) On matching and thickness in heterogeneous dynamic markets. Oper. Res. 67(4):927–949.AbstractGoogle Scholar
  • Ashlagi I, Gamarnik D, Rees MA, Roth AE (2012) The need for (long) chains in kidney exchange. Working Paper No. 18202, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
  • Awasthi P, Sandholm T (2009) Online stochastic optimization in the large: Application to kidney exchange. Kitano H, ed. Proc. 21st Internat. Joint Conf. Artificial Intelligence (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco), 405–411.Google Scholar
  • Axelrod DA, Schnitzler MA, Xiao H, Irish W, Tuttle-Newhall E, Chang SH, Kasiske BL, Alhamad T, Lentine KL (2018) An economic assessment of contemporary kidney transplant practice. Amer. J. Transplantation 18(5):1168–1176.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Barkel M, Colley R, Delorme M, Manlove D, Pettersson W (2026) Operational research approaches and mathematical models for kidney exchange: A literature survey and empirical evaluation. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 331(2):325–350.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Benedek M, Biró P, Paulusma D, Ye X (2024) Computing balanced solutions for large international kidney exchange schemes. Autonomous Agents Multi-Agent Systems 38(1):18.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Bertsimas D, Farias VF, Trichakis N (2011) The price of fairness. Oper. Res. 59(1):17–31. LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Bertsimas D, Farias VF, Trichakis N (2013) Fairness, efficiency, and flexibility in organ allocation for kidney transplantation. Oper. Res. 61(1):73–87.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Bidkhori H, Dickerson J, McElfresh D, Ren K (2020) Kidney exchange with inhomogeneous edge existence uncertainty. Peters J, Sontag D, eds. Proc. 36th Conf. Uncertainty Artificial Intelligence. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 124 (JMLR.org), 161–170.Google Scholar
  • Bolton GE, Brandts J, Ockenfels A (2005) Fair procedures: Evidence from games involving lotteries. Econom. J. 115(506):1054–1076.Google Scholar
  • Carvalho M, Lodi A (2023) A theoretical and computational equilibria analysis of a multi-player kidney exchange program. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 305(1):373–385.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Carvalho M, Caulfield A, Lin Y, Vetta A (2024) Penalties and rewards for fair learning in paired kidney exchange programs. Garg J, Klimm M, Kong Y, eds. Web and Internet Economics (Springer, Cham, Switzerland), 130–150.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Carvalho M, Lodi A, Pedroso JP, Viana A (2017) Nash equilibria in the two-player kidney exchange game. Math. Programming 161(1–2):389–417. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Carvalho M, Klimentova X, Glorie K, Viana A, Constantino M (2020) Robust models for the kidney exchange problem. INFORMS J. Comput. 33(3):861–881.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2024) Chronic kidney disease basics. Accessed January 14, 2026, https://www.cdc.gov/kidney-disease/about/index.html.Google Scholar
  • Collette R (2023) Weak core solution for the non-transferable utility kidney exchange game. Master’s thesis, University of Montreal, Montreal.Google Scholar
  • Cuffy MC, Ratner LE, Siegler M, Woodle ES (2015) Equipoise: Ethical, scientific, and clinical trial design considerations for compatible pair participation in kidney exchange programs. Amer. J. Transplantation 15(6):1484–1489.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Delorme M, García S, Gondzio J, Kalcsics J, Manlove D, Pettersson W (2023) New algorithms for hierarchical optimization in kidney exchange programs. Oper. Res. 72(4):1654–1673.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Delorme M, García S, Gondzio J, Kalcsics J, Manlove D, Pettersson W, Trimble J (2022) Improved instance generation for kidney exchange programmes. Comput. Oper. Res. 141:105707.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Dickerson JP, Sandholm T (2015) Futurematch: Combining human value judgments and machine learning to match in dynamic environments. Proc. 29th AAAI Conf. Artificial Intelligence (AAAI Press, Washington, DC), 622–628. Google Scholar
  • Dickerson JP, Procaccia AD, Sandholm T (2012) Optimizing kidney exchange with transplant chains: Theory and reality. van der Hoek W, Padgham L, Conitzer V, Winikoff W, eds. Proc. 11th Internat. Conf. Autonomous Agents Multiagent Systems, vol. 2 (International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC), 711–718.Google Scholar
  • Dickerson JP, Procaccia AD, Sandholm T (2013) Failure-aware kidney exchange. Proc. 14th ACM Conf. Electronic Commerce (Association for Computing Machinery, New York), 323–340.Google Scholar
  • Dickerson JP, Procaccia AD, Sandholm T (2014a) Empirical price of fairness in failure-aware kidney exchange. Towards Better More Affordable Healthcare: Incentives, Game Theory, Artificial Intelligence Workshop at AAMAS-2014 (International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC).Google Scholar
  • Dickerson JP, Procaccia AD, Sandholm T (2014b) Price of fairness in kidney exchange. Lomuscio A, Scerri P, Bazzan A, Huhns M, eds. Proc. 2014 Internat. Conf. Autonomous Agents Multi-Agent Systems (International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC), 1013–1020.Google Scholar
  • Dickerson JP, Procaccia AD, Sandholm T (2018) Failure-aware kidney exchange. Management Sci. 65(4):1768–1791.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Dwork C, Hardt M, Pitassi T, Reingold O, Zemel R (2012) Fairness through awareness. Proc. Third Innovations Theoret. Comput. Sci. Conf. (Association for Computing Machinery, New York), 214–226.Google Scholar
  • Farnadi G, St-Arnaud W, Babaki B, Carvalho M (2021) Individual fairness in kidney exchange programs. Proc. AAAI Conf. Artificial Intelligence 35(13):11496–11505.Google Scholar
  • Foley DP, Sawinski D (2020) Personalizing donor kidney selection: Choosing the right donor for the right recipient. Clinical J. Amer. Soc. Nephrology 15(3):418–420.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Freedman R, Borg JS, Sinnott-Armstrong W, Dickerson JP, Conitzer V (2020) Adapting a kidney exchange algorithm to align with human values. Artificial Intelligence 283:103261.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Glorie KM, van de Klundert JJ, Wagelmans APW (2014) Kidney exchange with long chains: An efficient pricing algorithm for clearing barter exchanges with branch-and-price. Manufacturing Service Oper. Management 16(4):498–512.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Gurobi Optimization, LLC (2025) Gurobi optimizer reference manual. Accessed February 21, 2025, https://docs.gurobi.com/projects/optimizer/en/current/.Google Scholar
  • Jackson KR, Segev DL (2022) Rethinking incompatibility in kidney transplantation. Amer. J. Transplantation 22(4):1031–1036.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Keizer KM, de Klerk M, Haase-Kromwijk BJJM, Weimar W (2005) The Dutch algorithm for allocation in living donor kidney exchange. Transplantation Proc. 37(2):589–591.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Klimentova X, Viana A, Pedroso JP, Santos N (2021) Fairness models for multi-agent kidney exchange programmes. Omega 102:102333.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Kratz J (2024) Conflicting objectives in kidney exchange. J. Econom. Theory 217:105803.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Lai YJ (1996) Hierarchical optimization: A satisfactory solution. Fuzzy Sets Systems 77(3):321–335.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Lorenz MO (1905) Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth. Publ. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 9(70):209–219.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Makhorin A (2020) GLPK (GNU linear programming kit), version 5.0. Accessed April 27, 2025, https://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/.Google Scholar
  • Massie AB, Leanza J, Fahmy LM, Chow EKH, Desai NM, Luo X, King EA, Bowring MG, Segev DL (2016) A risk index for living donor kidney transplantation. Amer. J. Transplantation 16(7):2077–2084.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Mattei N, Saffidine A, Walsh T (2018) Fairness in deceased organ matching. Proc. 2018 AAAI/ACM Conf. AI Ethics Soc. (Association for Computing Machinery, New York), 236–242.Google Scholar
  • McElfresh DC, Dickerson JP (2018) Balancing lexicographic fairness and a utilitarian objective with application to kidney exchange. Proc. AAAI Conf. Artificial Intelligence 32(1):1161–1168.Google Scholar
  • Minitab, LLC (2025) Minitab statistical software. Accessed May 29, 2025, https://www.minitab.com.Google Scholar
  • Nash JF Jr (1950) The bargaining problem. Econometrica 18(2):155–162. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Rawls J (2001) Principles of justice. Kelly E, ed. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA), 39–79.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Riascos-Álvarez LC (2023) Optimization models for kidney paired donation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Toronto.Google Scholar
  • Riascos-Álvarez LC, Bodur M, Aleman DM (2023) A branch-and-price algorithm enhanced by decision diagrams for the kidney exchange problem. Manufacturing Service Oper. Management 26(2):485–499. LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Roth AE, Sönmez T, Ünver MU (2005) Pairwise kidney exchange. J. Econom. Theory 125(2):151–188.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Roth AE, Sönmez T, Ünver MU (2007) Efficient kidney exchange: Coincidence of wants in markets with compatibility-based preferences. Amer. Econom. Rev. 97(3):828–851.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Saidman SL, Roth AE, Sönmez T, Ünver MU, Delmonico FL (2006) Increasing the opportunity of live kidney donation by matching for two- and three-way exchanges. Transplantation 81(5):773–782.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Sandholm T (2023) Modern organ exchanges: Market designs, algorithms, and opportunities. Accessed September 5, 2024, https://underline.io/events/380/sessions/14097/lecture/70631-modern-organ-exchanges-market-designs-algorithms-and-opp ortunities.Google Scholar
  • Sharifi S (2025) Enhancing kidney transplantation through multi-agent kidney exchange programs: A comprehensive review and optimization models. Internat. J. Indust. Engrg. Comput. 16(2):483–498CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Smeulders B, Bartier V, Crama Y, Spieksma FCR (2021) Recourse in kidney exchange programs. INFORMS J. Comput. 34(2):1191–1206.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Sonmez T, Ünver MU (2015) Enhancing the efficiency of and equity in transplant organ allocation via incentivized exchange. Preprint, submitted January 19, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2551344.Google Scholar
  • St-Arnaud W, Carvalho M, Farnadi G (2025) Adaptation, comparison and practical implementation of fairness schemes in kidney exchange programs. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 325(1):38–52.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Stewart DE, Wilk AR, Toll AE, Harper AM, Lehman RR, Robinson AM, Noreen SA, Edwards EB, Klassen DK (2018) Measuring and monitoring equity in access to deceased donor kidney transplantation. Amer. J. Transplantation 18(8):1924–1935.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Su X, Zenios SA (2006) Recipient choice can address the efficiency-equity trade-off in kidney transplantation: A mechanism design model. Management Sci. 52(11):1647–1660.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Sun Z, Todo T, Walsh T (2021) Fair pairwise exchange among groups. Zhou Z, ed. Proc. 30th Internat. Joint Conf. Artificial Intelligence (International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization), 419–425.Google Scholar
  • Terasaki PI, Cecka JM, Gjertson DW, Takemoto S (1995) High survival rates of kidney transplants from spousal and living unrelated donors. New England J. Medicine 333(6):333–336.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Tyler TR (1996) The relationship of the outcome and procedural fairness: How does knowing the outcome influence judgments about the procedure? Soc. Justice Res. 9:311–325.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
  • Wolfe RA, Ashby VB, Milford EL, Ojo AO, Ettenger RE, Agodoa LYC, Held PJ, Port FK (1999) Comparison of mortality in all patients on dialysis, patients on dialysis awaiting transplantation, and recipients of a first cadaveric transplant. New England J. Medicine 341(23):1725–1730.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
INFORMS site uses cookies to store information on your computer. Some are essential to make our site work; Others help us improve the user experience. By using this site, you consent to the placement of these cookies. Please read our Privacy Statement to learn more.