This explores the applicability of Sen's capability approach to the economic evaluation of health care programmes. An individual's 'capability set' describes his freedom to choose valuable activities and states of being ('functionings'). Direct estimation and valuation of capability sets is not feasible at present. Standard preference-based methods such as willingness to pay are feasible, but p...

This paper reviews recent work examining two topics of economic research vital for invasive species policy—integration and valuation. Integration requires bioeconomic models that blend invasive biology with economic circumstances and the feedback loops between the two systems. Valuation requires nonmarket valuation associated with human and environmental damages posed by invasive species. We ar...

AbstractHealth economic evaluation research plays an important role in selecting cost-effective interventions. The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of published articles in Iranian journals related to economic evaluation in health care programs based on Drummond’s checklist in terms of numbers, features, and quality. In the present review study, published articles (Persian and En...

BACKGROUND To present an episodic random utility model that unifies time trade-off and discrete choice approaches in health state valuation. METHODS First, we introduce two alternative random utility models (RUMs) for health preferences: the episodic RUM and the more common instant RUM. For the interpretation of time trade-off (TTO) responses, we show that the episodic model implies a coeffic...

Proposition algebra is based on Hoare’s conditional connective, which is a ternary connective comparable to if-then-else and used in the setting of propositional logic. Conditional statements are provided with a simple semantics that is based on evaluation trees and that characterizes so-called free valuation congruence: two conditional statements are free valuation congruent if, and only if, t...

INTRODUCTION The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is widely used to assess the burden of different health problems and risk factors. The disability weight, a value anchored between 0 (perfect health) and 1 (equivalent to death), is necessary to estimate the disability component (years lived with disability, YLDs) of the DALY. After publication of the ground-breaking Global Burden of Disease...

There have been few attempts to elicit health state valuations from the general population, and previous studies typically have focused on fully literate populations in economically developed countries such as Canada (Sackett and Torrance 1978) and the United Kingdom (Gudex et al. 1996). Because population-based empirical assessments of health states are extremely limited, new surveys are neede...