When Do the "Dollars" Make Sense?

Bernie O'Brien and Amiram Gafni

Medical Decision Making, 1996, vol. 16, issue 3, 288-299

Abstract: There is growing interest in the application of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as a tech nique for the economic evaluation of health care programs. A distinguishing feature of CBA is that costs and benefits are expressed in the same units of value—typically money. A popular method for estimating money values for health care programs is the use of willingness-to-pay (or accept) survey techniques known as contingent valuation. This paper presents a conceptual framework to help in the interpretation or design of contingent valuation studies in health care. To be consistent with the theory upon which CBA is built, the authors consider what types of questions should be asked of what populations. They conclude that studies undertaking contingent valuation should dis tinguish between compensating variation and equivalent variation, and recognize that respondents can be gainers or losers in utility and therefore should be asked willing ness-to-pay (or accept) questions as appropriate. Current critical-appraisal guidance in the health care literature for CBA is poor and unlikely to offer useful demarcation between good and bad CBA studies. More work is needed exploring whether recently issued guidelines for contingent valuation in environmental damage assessment are applicable to health care studies. Key words: cost-benefit analysis; contingent valu ation ; willingness to pay. (Med Decis Making 1996;16:288-299)

Date: 1996
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X9601600314 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:16:y:1996:i:3:p:288-299

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X9601600314

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().