When deciding how to weigh benefits to different groups, standard economic models assume that people focus on the final distribution of utility, health or whatever. Thus, an egalitarian is assumed to be an egalitarian in the outcome space. But what about egalitarianism in the gains space, such...

The person trade-off (PTO) is increasingly being used to elicit preferences in health. This paper explores the measurement properties of the PTO method in the context of a study about how members of the public prioritise between patients of different ages. In particular, it considers whether PTO...

In cost-utility analysis, the numbers of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) gained are aggregated according to the sum-ranking (or QALY maximisation) rule. This requires that the social value from health improvements is a simple product of gains in quality of life, length of life and the number...

This article presents an empirical assessment of the relevance of different factors when understanding preferences for outcome-egalitarian policies in health, in particular respondent age and sex. A representative sample of the Spanish population was interviewed (n = 1209). After being informed...

Elicitation of utilities from members of the public generally uses verbal description of health states. This paper reports the results of a small-scale time trade-off study on the feasibility of an alternative approach, where health states were simulated using plastic spectacles. This approach...

Introduction: The legal studies literature on procedural justice identifies six key characteristics of procedural justice: accuracy, consistency, impartiality, reversibility, transparency and voice. However, the relative importance of these in the context of public healthcare resource allocation...

This paper examines the differences in health state valuations given by patients when they are asked to value their own current states, and those given by members of the general population who were asked to value hypothetical health states. Patient data consist of 4137 observations on EQ-5D...

In 2009, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued supplementary advice to its Appraisal Committees to be taken into account when appraising life-extending, ‘end-of-life’ treatments. This indicated that if certain criteria are met, it may be appropriate to...

Recent years have seen increasing interest in the use of ordinal methods to elicit health state utility values as an alternative to conventional methods such as standard gamble and time trade-off (TTO). However, in order to use these ordinal methods to produce health state values for use in...

A voluntary blood donation system can be seen as a public good. People can take advantage without contributing, which leads to the so called free-rider problem. An empirical study is undertaken to analyse the extent of free-riding and its determinants in this context. Interviews of the general...