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

Ottar Mæstad () and Ole Frithjof Norheim

Journal of Health Economics, 2009, vol. 28, issue 3, 570-577

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.

Keywords: Health; equity; Distributional; weights; Eliciting; preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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