A kidney transplant is a lifesaving operation—and yet every year in the United States, about 10 percent of donated kidneys go unused, after being rejected by multiple potential recipients.

Why is this? According to Juanjuan Zhang, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the potential recipients who reject seemingly viable kidneys are engaging in “observational learning,” the cognitive process of intuiting answers based on limited information—and sometimes drawing the wrong conclusions from those observations.

More specifically, when a first possible recipient rejects a kidney, it can set off a series of decisions made by patients who think that if other people rejected the organ, there must be something wrong with it. But that is not necessarily the case: Potential kidney recipients know if a kidney has been rejected—but they cannot talk to other patients to find out the reasons for those decisions, which are made quickly (since kidneys have about a two-day period in which they can be transplanted).

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