CAREER: Optimizing Healthcare Operations through Incentive Mechanism Design

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant will contribute to the advancement of national prosperity and economic welfare by supporting research on the design and analysis of incentive mechanisms that promote optimal health behaviors and efficient utilization of scarce resources, in this case organs donated for transplantation. The research addresses the improvement of organ utilization by reducing the number of donated organs that are discarded without being transplanted, efficient patient-organ matching, stimulation of organ availability by incentivizing organ donation, and the promotion of wellness through optimally designed and timed incentives. By incorporating behavioral aspects into healthcare operations, the project develops strategic incentives to help align individual actions with societal well-being without imposing mandatory compliance. The educational component of this work will enrich the operations research curriculum with behavioral concepts, foster interdisciplinary understanding by educating medical researchers about advanced modeling techniques, and engage underrepresented students through collaboration with an HBCU, contributing to a diverse, inclusive, and effective scientific workforce. This project will bridge the fields of operations research and behavioral economics to construct and evaluate incentive mechanisms within healthcare settings using a variety of stochastic dynamic modeling techniques, including queueing game models, principal-agent models, and discrete-time finite-horizon models while linking the strategic decisions of individuals to overarching societal goals. Real-life data and clinically detailed simulation models will be employed to empirically validate the mechanisms, ensuring that the research outcomes can fruitfully inform policymaking. The analysis methods developed also have the potential to inform incentive design in other application domains where individual and societal interests intersect. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.