Assessing and comparing costs: how robust are the bootstrap and methods based on asymptotic normality?
Abstract
This article addresses and challenges some common perceptions in the statistical assessment of costs and cost-effectiveness in health economics. Cost data typically exhibit highly skew distributions. Two techniques whose validity does not depend on any specific form of underlying distribution are the bootstrap and methods based on asymptotic normality of sample means. These methods are generally thought to be appropriate for the analysis of cost data. We argue that, even when these methods are technically valid, they may often lead to inefficient and even misleading inferences. It is important to apply methods that recognise the skewness in cost data. We further demonstrate that it may also be important to incorporate relevant prior information in a Bayesian analysis. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Download Info
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Article provided by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. in its journal Health Economics.
Volume (Year): 12 (2003)
Issue (Month): 1 ()
Pages: 33-49
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Web page: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/5749
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- Maiwenn J. Al & Ben A. Van Hout, 2000. "A Bayesian approach to economic analyses of clinical trials: the case of stenting versus balloon angioplasty," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 9(7), pages 599-609.
- Andrew H. Briggs & David E. Wonderling & Christopher Z. Mooney, 1997. "Pulling cost-effectiveness analysis up by its bootstraps: A non-parametric approach to confidence interval estimation," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 6(4), pages 327-340.
- Andrew H. Briggs, 1999. "A Bayesian approach to stochastic cost-effectiveness analysis," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 8(3), pages 257-261.
Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Andrew R. Willan & Matthew E. Kowgier, 2008. "Cost-effectiveness analysis of a multinational RCT with a binary measure of effectiveness and an interacting covariate," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 17(7), pages 777-791.
- Pammolli, Fabio & Riccaboni, Massimo & Oglialoro, Claudia & Magazzini, Laura & Baio, Gianluca & Salerno, Nicola, 2005. "Medical Devices Competitiveness and Impact on Public Health Expenditure," MPRA Paper 16021, University Library of Munich, Germany.
- Richard M. Nixon & David Wonderling & Richard D. Grieve, 2010. "Non-parametric methods for cost-effectiveness analysis: the central limit theorem and the bootstrap compared," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 19(3), pages 316-333.
- Caterina Conigliani, 2008. "A bayesian model averaging approach with non-informative priors for cost-effectiveness analyses in health economics," Departmental Working Papers of Economics - University 'Roma Tre' 0094, Department of Economics - University Roma Tre.
- Anne Prenzler & Bernd Bokemeyer & J.-Matthias Schulenburg & Thomas Mittendorf, 2011. "Health care costs and their predictors of inflammatory bowel diseases in Germany," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer, vol. 12(3), pages 273-283, June.
- Caterina Conigliani & Andrea Tancredi, 2006. "Comparing parametric and semi-parametric approaches for bayesian cost-effectiveness analyses in health economics," Departmental Working Papers of Economics - University 'Roma Tre' 0064, Department of Economics - University Roma Tre.
- Casey Quinn, 2005. "Generalisable regression methods for costeffectiveness using copulas," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 05/13, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.
- Thompson, Simon G. & Nixon, Richard M. & Grieve, Richard, 2006. "Addressing the issues that arise in analysing multicentre cost data, with application to a multinational study," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(6), pages 1015-1028, November.
- O'Hagan, Anthony & Stevens, John W., 2004. "On estimators of medical costs with censored data," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 615-625, May.
- Caterina Conigliani & Andrea Tancredi, 2009. "A Bayesian model averaging approach for cost-effectiveness analyses," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 18(7), pages 807-821.
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