Physicians are increasingly faced with choices in which one screening strategy is both more effective and more expensive than another. One way to make such choices is to examine the cost-effectiveness of the more costly strategy over the less costly one. However, little is known about how...

Utility functions are an important component of normative decision analysis, in that they characterize the nature of people's risk-taking attitudes. In this paper we examine various factors that make it difficult to speak of the utility function for a given person. Similarly we show that it is...