Health systems around the world are grappling with the difficult issue of how to allocate scare healthcare resources. Within Europe many different approaches to healthcare resource allocation exist, but it is clear that the formal techniques of cost-effectiveness analysis are becoming increasingly important. This presentation will first address the fundamental economic principles of scarcity an...

Despite the growing use of decision analytic modelling in cost-effectiveness analysis, there is a relatively small literature on what constitutes good practice in decision analysis. The aim of this paper is to consider the concept of 'validity' and 'quality' in this area of evaluation, and to suggest a framework by which quality can be demonstrated on the part of the analyst and assessed by the...

BACKGROUND Priority setting is necessary in current healthcare services. Discussion of fair process has highlighted the value of developing reasons for allocation decisions on the basis of experience gained from real cases. AIM To identify the reasons that those with experience of real decision-making concerning resource allocation think relevant in deciding on the priority of a new but expen...

Traditional cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) assumes that program costs and benefits scale linearly with investment-an unrealistic assumption for epidemic control programs. This paper combines epidemic modeling with optimization techniques to determine the optimal allocation of a limited resource for epidemic control among multiple noninteracting populations. We show that the optimal resource ...

Firms routinely allocate the costs of common corporate resources down to divisions. We seek to understand whether cost allocation rules can induce efficient consumption of corporate resources in an incomplete contracting framework. We propose a new allocation rule (the polynomial rule), which achieves efficiency and approximate budget balance. We also examine conditions under which simple alloc...

Problems of allocating joint costs in a reasonable way arise in many practical situations where people decide to work together to save costs. Cost allocation methods based on game theoretical concepts take into account the strategic aspects of cost allocation situations. We give a survey of cost allocation methods based on the nucleolus and the Shapley value, and introduce also a new one, the s...