Stochastic Control for Organ Donations: A Review

Abstract

We review the literature on individual patient organ acceptance decision making by presenting a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to formulate the organ acceptance decision process as a stochastic control problem. Under the umbrella of the MDP framework, we classify and summarize the major research streams and contributions. In particular, we focus on control limit-type policies, which are shown to be optimal under certain conditions and easy to implement in practice. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and directions for future research.