There are tons of markets that don't exist because people just don't want to allow a market – for whatever reason, people feel icky about putting a price on something. For example: Surrogacy is a legal industry in parts of the United States, but not in much of the rest of the world. Assisted end-of-life is a legal medical transaction in some states, but is illegal in others. When we have those knee-jerk reactions and our gut repels us from considering something apparently icky, economics asks us to look a little more closely. Today on the show, we have three recommendations of things that may feel kinda wrong but economics suggests may actually be the better way. First: Could the matching process of organ donation be more efficient if people could buy and sell organs? Then: Should women seek revenge more often in the workplace? And finally, what if insider trading is actually useful? This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Greg Rosalsky. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Cena Loffredo. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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A couple decades ago, Al Roth was working on solving this problem.
People who needed kidneys weren't getting matched effectively with people who had kidneys to donate.
Part of the kind of work I do is called matching theory.
Al helped create this, like, beautiful, elegant algorithm that would match kidney donors with recipients.
You obviously won a pretty big prize for this work.
I did.
I recommend it.
Yeah?
You like the prize?
It's a good prize, yeah, that's good to know.
Week long of parties, the prize he won, it was the Nobel Prize in economics.
As you might know, ALS matching work vastly improved the way people get kidneys and saved literally thousands of lives.
Like in the year 2000.