Interest in the use of net health benefit in cost-effectiveness analysis derives from its optimality property for decision-making. A description of the results of an economic evaluation of health care interventions is incomplete if it does not include point and interval estimates of this outcome...

Methods for statistical inference for cost-effectiveness (C|E) ratios for individual treatments and for incremental cost-effectiveness (&Dgr;C|&Dgr;E) ratios when two treatments are compared are presented. In a lemma, we relate the relative magnitude of two C|E ratios to the &Dgr;C|&Dgr;E ratio. We describe a...

Statistical methods are given for producing a cost-effectiveness frontier for an arbitrary number of programs. In the deterministic case, the net health benefit (NHB) decision rule is optimal; the rule funds the program with the largest positive NHB at each &lgr;, the amount a decision-maker is...

We demonstrate that average cost-effectiveness ratios (CERs) play an important role in the evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of treatments. Criticisms of the usefulness of CERs derive mostly from the context of resource allocation under a constrained budget in which some decisions are based...

Both incremental cost-effectiveness ratios and net benefits have been proposed as summary measures for use in cost-effectiveness analyses. We present a unifying proof of the optimality and equivalence of ICER- and net benefit-based approaches to the health resource allocation problem, including...