Effect of persuasive messages on organ donation decisions: An experimental test

The supply of deceased donor organs is a limiting factor for transplantation based therapies. This paper utilizes a laboratory experiment to evaluate the effect of supplementing the organ donor registration request with a persuasive message on donation decisions. The informational message provided in the experiment contains information about the additional dollar amount a potential recipient could earn after receiving an organ in the experiment. Results of the experiment indicate that an informational message had a positive impact at the beginning of the experiment, but this treatment effect slowly wore off over time. The results also suggest subjects’ donation decisions in the experiment were highly associated with their donor registration status in real life. Subjects who are registered donors in real life were more likely to register in the experiment than those who are not donors, while this gap was perfectly closed when the informational message was introduced. Subjects who are not donors in real life were 17% more likely to register as a donor in the experiment when they were provided with the message.

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