Currently, health state values are usually obtained from members of the general public trying to imagine what the state would be like rather than by patients who are actually in the various states of health. Valuations of a health state by patients tend to vary from those of the general...

What causes us to vote and what do we get out of it? We approach these questions using data on voting and subjective well-being (SWB) from a large household panel dataset in the UK. We find some evidence that SWB can affect voting intention but no evidence that the results of three recent...

An important consideration when establishing priorities in healthcare is the likely effect that alternative allocations will have on the health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) of the relevant population. This paper considers some of the important issues and controversies surrounding the...

Most health economists recommend that improvements in health be valued by asking members of the general public to imagine themselves in different states of health and then to think about how many years of life they would give up or what risk of death they would be willing to accept in order to...

Many government interventions seek to reduce the risk of death. The value of preventing a fatality (VPF) is the monetary amount associated with each statistical death that an intervention can be expected to prevent. The VPF has been estimated using a preference-based approach, either by...

The literature on income distribution has attempted to evaluate different degrees of inequality using a social welfare function (SWF) approach. However, it has largely ignored the source of such inequalities, and has thus failed to consider different degrees of inequity. The literature on...