The issue of the nature of the altruism inherent in blood donation and the perverse effects of financial rewards for blood and/or organ donation has been recently revisited in the economic literature with limited consensus. As Titmuss (1970) famously pointed out, providing monetary incentives to...

In many low- and middle-income countries blood donations per capita are substantially lower than in advanced economies. In these countries blood supply is mostly collected through donations by relatives and friends of individuals needing transfusions or to replace blood used in emergencies. The...

Experimental studies document that financial rewards discourage the performance of altruistic activities, because they destroy intrinsic altruistic motivations. We set up a randomized-controlled experiment, through a survey administered to 467 blood donors in an Italian town, and find that...

In the fight against blood doping, the interpretation of the measured levels of blood markers is based on either population-derived reference ranges or the previous test history of the individual under scrutiny. In this report, we demonstrate how an empirical hierarchical Bayesian model can be...

We examine how economic incentives affect pro-social behavior through the analysis of a unique dataset with information on more than 14,000 American Red Cross blood drives. Our findings are consistent with blood donors responding to incentives in a "standard" way; offering donors economic...

In the 1980s, Chinese regulators were quick to impose tough restrictions on the import of blood products into China when HIV/AIDS first came to light in industrialized countries. In spite of such precautions, China still ended up with a massive blood-related HIV/AIDS crisis, particularly among...