There have been many tests of the descriptive validity of the axioms of expected utility theory (EU) using money outcomes. Such tests are relatively uncommon with respect to health outcomes. This is unfortunate, because the standard gamble - considered by many health economists to be the gold...

During fiscal year 1997 the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport of Japan introduced a system for evaluating road investment projects that considers reduction of road accidents as well as savings in time and running costs. However, the unit cost to calculate the benefit of reducing...

This article reports a study that tests whether the internal consistency of the standard gamble can be improved upon by incorporating loss weighting and probability transformation parameters in the standard gamble valuation procedure. Five alternatives to the standard EU formulation are...

Vaccination is different from most health interventions because it is preventative, it protects against infectious disease (leading to knock-on effects), the diseases it prevents are usually acute and self-limiting, and most vaccines are given to children from whom it is very difficult to elicit...

In 1992, the Measurement and Valuation of Health (MVH) Group at the Centre for Health Economics conducted a study with Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) comparing different methods of valuing health states (Dolan et al, 1993). A random sample of 335 members of the general population...

A central question in many debates on paternalism is whether a decision analyst can ever go against the stated preference of a client, even if merely intending to improve the decisions for the client. Using four gedanken-experiments, this paper shows that this central question, so cleverly and...

This paper tests whether logically equivalent risk formats can lead to different health state utilities elicited by means of the traditional standard gamble (SG) method and a modified version of the method that we call ``double lottery.'' We compare utilities for health states elicited when...

Over the last decade, evidence has accumulated in the mainstream economics literature indicating that, contrary to economic theory, indifference curves are irreversible. The methods in question - willingness to pay versus willingness to accept and standard gamble versus certainty equivalence -...

This paper tests whether logically equivalent risk formats can lead to different health state utilities elicited by means of the standard gamble (SG) method. We compare SG utilities elicited when probabilities are framed in terms of frequencies with respect to 100 people in the population (i.e.,...