Gambling With Health - A Method to Test Decision Under Risk in the Domain of Health
(2007)Department of Economics
- Abstract
- In order to know how to efficiently allocate resources in health care we need a measure of its outcome, health. There is an ongoing debate on how the values of different health states are best measured. The dominating approach is to elicit utilities from decisions made by the public, in an experimental setting. In order to elicit valid utilities a theory of how decisions are made is needed. Traditionally the expected utility theory has been used but recently the prospect theory has been shown much interest. In this thesis a method is developed to test which one of these two theories is most suitable to use in the domain of health. The general idea behind the method is that each respondent constructs her own scale for rating health states.... (More)
- In order to know how to efficiently allocate resources in health care we need a measure of its outcome, health. There is an ongoing debate on how the values of different health states are best measured. The dominating approach is to elicit utilities from decisions made by the public, in an experimental setting. In order to elicit valid utilities a theory of how decisions are made is needed. Traditionally the expected utility theory has been used but recently the prospect theory has been shown much interest. In this thesis a method is developed to test which one of these two theories is most suitable to use in the domain of health. The general idea behind the method is that each respondent constructs her own scale for rating health states. The method is also applied in a small scale experiment. It is concluded that the method seems applicable. Furthermore, the experiment indicates that probability weighting is plausible while the other features of the prospect theory are not clearly supported. The thesis ends with a brief discussion about how the method could be used in future surveys. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/1337385
- author
- Tops, Jonatan
- supervisor
- organization
- year
- 2007
- type
- M2 - Bachelor Degree
- subject
- keywords
- QALY, Prospect theory, expected utility, Economics, econometrics, economic theory, economic systems, economic policy, Nationalekonomi, ekonometri, ekonomisk teori, ekonomiska system, ekonomisk politik
- language
- English
- id
- 1337385
- date added to LUP
- 2007-02-12 00:00:00
- date last changed
- 2010-08-03 10:49:34
@misc{1337385, abstract = {{In order to know how to efficiently allocate resources in health care we need a measure of its outcome, health. There is an ongoing debate on how the values of different health states are best measured. The dominating approach is to elicit utilities from decisions made by the public, in an experimental setting. In order to elicit valid utilities a theory of how decisions are made is needed. Traditionally the expected utility theory has been used but recently the prospect theory has been shown much interest. In this thesis a method is developed to test which one of these two theories is most suitable to use in the domain of health. The general idea behind the method is that each respondent constructs her own scale for rating health states. The method is also applied in a small scale experiment. It is concluded that the method seems applicable. Furthermore, the experiment indicates that probability weighting is plausible while the other features of the prospect theory are not clearly supported. The thesis ends with a brief discussion about how the method could be used in future surveys.}}, author = {{Tops, Jonatan}}, language = {{eng}}, note = {{Student Paper}}, title = {{Gambling With Health - A Method to Test Decision Under Risk in the Domain of Health}}, year = {{2007}}, }