Efficient kidney exchange:: Coincidence of wants in markets with compatibility-based preferences

Patients needing kidney transplants may have donors who cannot donate to them because of blood or tissue incompatibility. Incompatible patient-donor pairs can exchange donor kidneys with other pairs only when there is a double coincidence of wants. Developing infrastructure to perform three-way as well as two-way exchanges will have a substantial effect on the number of transplants that can be arranged. Larger than three-way exchanges have less impact on efficiency. In a general model of type-compatible exchanges, the size of the largest exchanges required to achieve efficiency equals the number of types.