Putting a Face on the Waiting List: Recipient Photographs and Organ-Donation Registration in Peru

Deceased-donor registries are chronically undersupplied. This is particularly true in developing countries. We ask whether putting a face on potential donors changes behavior. In a laboratory experiment in Peru, sessions were randomly assigned to a text-only registration request or to one accompanied by a photograph of a prospective recipient. Since treatment is assigned by session, we take the session as the unit of inference. When registering is costly, a photograph raises registration by 7.0 percentage points on a control mean of 36.2 percent; the effect is concentrated in the initial costly block and is not detected in the subsequent costless block. Given that block order is confounded with cost, this is consistent with a cost-dependent treatment effect. Every subject also ranked photographs of two ethnicities; subjects register more often in the rounds showing the photograph they themselves ranked more favorably, while the same variable constructed for control subjects is null.