In an organ-allocation system based solely on fairness, organs may simply go to the person who has been waiting the longest. But if you care about efficiency, you might give the organ to the healthiest patient who is likely to live the longest after the transplant.
Trichakis tried to to balance fairness and efficiency in kidney transplants while developing an algorithm. He found that if you employed his model for one year, as opposed to the model currently in use, total life expectancy gains for patients in the database would exceed 5,000 years of life.
