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Eliciting people's preferences for the distribution of health: A procedure for a more precise estimation of distributional weights

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  • Mæstad, Ottar
  • Norheim, Ole Frithjof

Abstract

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.

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  • Mæstad, Ottar & Norheim, Ole Frithjof, 2009. "Eliciting people's preferences for the distribution of health: A procedure for a more precise estimation of distributional weights," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 570-577, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:28:y:2009:i:3:p:570-577
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    1. Erik Nord & Jose Luis Pinto & Jeff Richardson & Paul Menzel & Peter Ubel, 1999. "Incorporating societal concerns for fairness in numerical valuations of health programmes," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 8(1), pages 25-39, February.
    2. Aki Tsuchiya, 2012. "Distributional Judgements in the Context of Economic Evaluation," Chapters, in: Andrew M. Jones (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Health Economics, Second Edition, chapter 38, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    3. Clive Bell, 2020. "COVID-19: mortality, future years lost, and demographic structure: Italy and Kenya compared," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2020-60, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    4. Mæstad, Ottar & Norheim, Ole Frithjof, 2012. "A universal preference for equality in health? Reasons to reconsider properties of applied social welfare functions," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 75(10), pages 1836-1843.
    5. Robberstad, Bjarne & Norheim, Ole F., 2011. "Incorporating concerns for equal lifetime health in evaluations of public health programs," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 72(10), pages 1711-1716, May.

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