SUMMARY Conventionally, generic quality‐of‐life health states, defined within multi‐attribute utility instruments, have been valued using a Standard Gamble or a Time Trade‐Off. Both are grounded in expected utility theory but impose strong assumptions about the form of the utility...

Cost utility analyses typically incorporate preferences based upon the mean values for health states generated from a sample of the general population. The main argument for using general population values rests upon the premise that in a publicly funded health care system the main objective of...

To investigate the nature of public preferences in the allocation of donor liver grafts for transplantation a social conjoint analysis (CA) technique was developed for a questionnaire survey. A convenience sample of academic and non-academic employees of a British University were invited to...

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Recently the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) updated its methods guidance for technology assessment. One aspect of the new guidance is to require the use of probabilistic sensitivity analysis with all cost-effectiveness models submitted to the Institute. The purpose of this...

The quality-adjusted life year (QALY) assumes that the value of a health state is linearly related to the time spent in it, which implies that the value of a health state is independent of the states which precede or follow it. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a suitable condition to test this...