Eliciting people's preferences for the distribution of health: A procedure for a more precise estimation of distributional weights.
In order to incorporate distributional concerns into cost-effectiveness analysis, it would be useful to elicit distributional weights that express people's valuation of marginal health gains at various levels of health. Distributional preferences are commonly elicited either through a person trade off (PTO) or a gain trade off (GTO) technique. An inherent problem of the GTO is that it is based on the valuation of non-marginal health gains. In practice, many contributions using the PTO also focus on non-marginal health gains. This paper demonstrates that the failure to distinguish appropriately between marginal and non-marginal health gains may lead to seriously misleading estimates of distributional weights. Moreover, the paper proposes a methodology for utilising information obtained through non-marginal analysis more efficiently in order to obtain more reliable estimates of distributional weights. The methodology was successfully applied in an empirical study of age weights.
Maestad
Ottar
O
Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway. ottar.mestad@cmi.no
Norheim
Ole Frithjof
OF
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D008017:Life Expectancy; D008875:Middle Aged; D017059:Models, Econometric; D011788:Quality of Life; D055815:Young Adult