Contingent valuation (CV) has been widely used to measure the potential benefits derived from different policy decisions. However, doubt now exists about the validity of the CV method and alternative approaches to benefit valuation have been proposed. The paper reports on the results of a study...

This paper considers the question of what ought to be valued in the context of measuring the outcomes of healthcare interventions. The answer is discrete health states in the case of the quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) model and an entire health profile in the case of the healthy-years...

OBJECTIVES: It has become increasingly common for preference-based measures of health-related quality of life to be used in the evaluation of different health-care interventions. For one such measure, The EuroQol, designed to be used for these purposes, it was necessary to derive a single index...

It has been suggested by a number of economists that decisions about how to allocate scarce health care resources should be informed by the cost per quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) of the different alternatives. One of the criticisms of the QALY approach is that it is based on the...

The numbers of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) gained are increasingly being used to represent the gains in individual utility from treatment. This requires that the value of a health improvement to an individual is a simple product of gains in quality of life and length of life. The article...

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a recognised as the economic evaluation technique that accords most with the underlying principles of standard welfare economic theory. However, due to problems associated with the technique, economists evaluating resources allocation decisions in health care have...

Objectives. The EQ-5D is a preference-based measure of health and is increasingly being used in the evaluation of health technologies. A 'tariff' of values for all 243 EQ-5D health states has been generated using direct valuations on a subset of these states. The tariff is used to express the...

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a major topic of research across the social sciences. Twin and family studies have found that genetic factors may account for as much as 30–40% of the variance in SWB. Here, we study genetic contributions to SWB in a pooled sample of ≈11,500 unrelated,...