Biobanks are increasingly hailed as powerful tools to advance health research. The social and ethical challenges associated with the implementation and operation of biobanks are equally well-documented. One of the proposed solutions to these challenges involves trading off a reduction in the...

The extension of informed consent into social science research has met with considerable opposition. The history and concept of informed consent, however, is based on a substantive ethical notion of the research relationship as informed and voluntary that is appropriate for social science...

As acknowledged in the literature, public consultation related to biobanks has been largely oriented to assuring and informing rather than seeking considered input. In April and May of 2007, the authors participated in running a deliberative public engagement event in British Columbia, Canada,...

Numerous countries have implemented centralized drug review processes to assist in making drug coverage decisions. In addition to examining the final recommendations of these bodies, it is also important to ensure fairness in decision making. Accountability for reasonableness is an ethics-based...

Responding to a stated preference discrete choice experiment (DCE) is a complex task for respondents to undertake. Task complexity can induce response error, thereby decreasing the statistical precision of the econometric model. This study explores the link between task complexity and...

Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) in health economics have recently used the mixed logit (MXL) model to incorporate preference heterogeneity. These studies typically use a classical approach to estimation or have specified normal distributions for the attributes. Specifying normal distributions...