The benefits of a large organ pool accrue not only to the actual organ recipients themselves, but to others as well due to the insurance it provides against having to wait ‘too long’ for an organ transplant. We argue that this public good character of a large organ pool makes it economically and ethically justifiable to design a market mechanism that boosts the number of donors. Most importantly, such a mechanism has the potential to substantially alleviate the troubling equity and (...) efficiency problems on the demand side while, at the same time, being entirely independent of the allocation algorithm used for the distribution of organs. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to inquire whether the paradigma-approach, developed by Thomas S. Kuhn, is able to serve as a useful instrument for the analysis of the dynamics of economic theory. The first part contains a discussion of the rational reconstruction of Kuhns idea, which was formulated by Sneed and Stegmüller. This discussion centers around the question, whether rationality alone can be the only criterion for scientific work. In order to introduce the specific conditions under which economic science (...) takes place, the paradigma-approach has to be extended. This extension has to take account of the non-scientific determination of scientific work. In this connection normal science and scientific revolutions have a concrete function in a process in the course of which non-scientific claims are transformed into scientific norms. (shrink)