Background: Medical cost-effectiveness analyses (CEA) traditionally treat patients as isolated individuals and neglect the effects of improvement in patients' health on the welfare of their family members. Recent analyses of the theoretical foundations of CEA suggest that cost-effectiveness...

Direct elicitation of utilities for joint health (JS) states may pose substantial interview burden, while traditional models to predict these utilities from utilities of component single states (SS) are inconsistent with the data. Using individual-level data on utilities for health states...