The Economics of Repugnance

A while back we wrote a New York Times column on organ donation: why there is so little of it, and why we don’t pay people for organs. One of the central themes in that column was Harvard economist Al Roth‘s idea that repugnance constrains markets. For those of you with a slightly more academic bent, Roth has just released a paper that discusses these ideas in a way that non-economists will understand.