Optimal healthcare decisions: The importance of the covariates in cost–effectiveness analysis

This paper deals with the decision problem of choosing an optimal medical treatment, among M possible candidates, when the states of nature are the net benefit of the treatments, and regression models for the treatment cost and effectiveness are assumed. In this setting a crucial step in the analysis is the construction of the population subgroups sharing characteristics specified by the covariates, so that optimal decisions are now not for the whole population of patients but for patient population subgroups.