Priorities and prospect theory

Most would agree that priority setting is necessary to avoid a financial collapse in the health sector. It is much harder to find criteria how to do it. Discussions lead straight to the principles of decision making. But since all theories depend on assumptions given to make them work, debates on the assumption side are open for any kind of critic. This might be a reason hyprefernce-based methods for evaluations of different health states are not as common and popular as they could be. Indeed, it can be shown that results derived by such methods are severly biased by phenomenons which are summarized in a so-called "Prospect Theory". These biases are quite obvious if one compares data of affected and unaffected people. But this theory offers, as well, a way to get results more accurate.