On the Foundation of Guidelines for Health Economic Evaluation

Hans Keiding
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Hans Keiding: Institute of Economics, University of Copenhagen

No 05-07, Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: In recent years, there has been increased interest in setting up guidelines for carrying out cost-effectiveness analysis of medical interventions, and some such guidelines have indeed been established. In the paper, we present a model of information retrievement and use in which we can study the role of guidelines. The main result, which is a version of the well-known theorem of Blackwell (1948), shows that in cases where there are sufficiently many decisions to be made on the basis of the information obtained, there can be no objective ranking of methods, except the trivial one stating that more information is better than less. The consequence is that guidelines, and the very detailed version known as the reference case approach, may have administrative advantages but can be harmful when considered as an aid towards better decisions.

Keywords: cost-effectiveness; guidelines; Blackwell’s theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12 pages
Date: 2005-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
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