Commitment Mechanisms and Blood Donation

The Australian Red Cross Blood Service (ARCBS) recently introduced a policy of compulsory appointments for blood donations. This thesis examines the effect of these appointments on donor satisfaction and donation behaviour. Overall, aggregate tests indicate that the policy transition initially had a negative effect. However, conditional on having donated once after the transition, donors are more likely to return. In order to isolate individual mechanisms that contribute to these results, a survey of blood donors is used to test two specific theories from behavioural economics. On the positive side, appointments are found to increase the likelihood that a donor will return, possibly by circumventing a problem of time-inconsistent preferences. However, the results also support a theory from the marketing literature that appointments change donors’ expectations, causing wait time to be more negatively perceived. Furthermore, this is found to cause a significant change in donors’ intended actions. The results of this thesis also allow specific policy recommendations to be made. First, staff should be encouraged to ask as many donors as possible to make a new appointment at the end of each donation, since donors who are asked to make an appointment are much more likely to do so, and making an appointment increases the likelihood of return. Second, it is suggested that donors with appointments be given some priority in the wait queue, in order to minimise the impact of long wait time on these donors. Finally, the finding that new donors are more negatively affected by wait time than others suggests that they too should be given some priority.