Acceptability of willingness to pay techniques to consumers.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to assess and compare the proportion of usable responses and protest votes obtained with two willingness to pay (WTP) techniques, contingent valuation (CV) and discrete choice experiment (DCE) and to assess the acceptability of the techniques to respondents.


METHODS
Pregnant women attending the public antenatal clinics of a Sydney teaching hospital were surveyed.


METHODS
Preference for either Treatment A (artificial rupture of the membranes followed by intravenous oxytocin) or Treatment B (prostaglandin E2 gel followed by oxytocin if necessary) was assessed. Then WTP for the preferred treatments was assessed using CV and WTP for specific attributes of the treatments in the DCE. In addition, the acceptability of the two techniques was compared in terms of responses deemed to be valid according to defined criteria, protest votes and comments recorded by consumers.


RESULTS
With the CV, 74% of respondents chose gel and their maximum WTP was Aus$178 compared with $133 for the alternative. A total of 68% of responses were deemed to be valid including 5% who may have been expressing a protest vote. With the DCE, respondents were WTP $55 for every 1 h reduction in the length of time from induction to delivery. A total of 72% of responses were deemed valid and only two of these 258 women were considered to have expressed a protest vote.


CONCLUSIONS
Only a small number of women expressed objections to the use of WTP questions in health-care and the majority of women completed both questions successfully.
Taylor
Susan J
SJ
Faculty of Pharmacy, Building A15, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. suet@pharm.usyd.edu.au
Armour
Carol L
CL
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001294:Attitude to Health; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D005382:Financing, Personal; D006302:Health Services Research; D017722:Hospital Charges; D006784:Hospitals, Teaching / Q000191:economics; D006801:Humans; D009517:New South Wales; D010044:Outpatient Clinics, Hospital; D017060:Patient Satisfaction / Q000191:economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011247:Pregnancy; D011295:Prenatal Care / Q000191:economics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012923:Social Class; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires