I am glad to have the opportunity to respond to the fine paper by Professors Smith and Sach (2009). They raise both foundational questions concerning the justification of contingent valuation studies in the health policy area, and important implementation questions concerning the appropriate design of such studies. I will focus my attention on the question of justification. The debate about con...

An important task in deriving a summary measure of health is to incorporate stated preferences into health state classifications. This paper examines a range of alternative econometric models for dealing with a skewed, truncated, non-continuous and hierarchical (at the individual level) data set of standard gamble valuations of health states defined by the health state classification the SF-6D....

This paper proposes a new methodology to assess demand and price-elasticity for health care, based on patients' stated willingness to pay (WTP) values for certain aspects of health care quality improvements. A conceptual analysis of how respondents consider contingent valuation (CV) questions allowed us to specify a probability density function of stated WTP values, and consequently, to model a...

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The aim of this paper is to generalize the‎ ‎notion of almost valuation domains to arbitrary commutative‎ ‎rings‎. ‎Also‎, ‎we consider relations between almost valuation rings ‎and pseudo-almost valuation rings‎. ‎We prove that the class of‎ ‎almost valuation rings is properly contained in the class of‎ ‎pseudo-almost valuation rings‎. ‎Among the properties of almost‎ ‎valuation rings‎, ‎we sh...

BACKGROUND There is conflicting evidence as to whether patients with chronic disease value hypothetical health states differently from individuals who have not experienced any long-lasting diseases. Furthermore, most studies regarding this issue have been conducted in western countries, with only one conducted in Asia. We aimed to evaluate possible systematic differences in the valuation of Eur...

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