New Journal Article: Directly Eliciting Personal Utility Functions

 

Over the last few years, OHE has been collaborating with colleagues from the University of Sheffield, University of Technology Sydney, and Pharmerit International to develop a new approach to valuing health-related quality of life. This approach involves directly eliciting personal utility functions (PUFs) from survey respondents, thereby seeking to avoid some of the issues associated with conventional techniques such as time trade-off and discrete choice experiment. The approach focuses on helping respondents to reflect and deliberate on their preferences, and results in a personal value set for each individual. It therefore has the potential for use in individual decision-making contexts.

 

Our paper, which describes the PUF method and reports the findings of piloting work to test its feasibility in valuing the EQ-5D, has just been published in the European Journal of Health Economics. The paper is available open access. 

 

The paper is authored by OHE’s Nancy Devlin and Koonal Shah, in collaboration with Brendan Mulhern, Krystallia Pantiri and Ben van Hout. A previous version was published as an OHE Research Paper, and preliminary findings were discussed at the 2016 PROMs conference. The research has parallels with work being undertaken in New Zealand to create personal and social value sets using the PAPRIKA method.

 

For more information about OHE’s research on personal utility functions, contact Koonal Shah.

 

 

Devlin, N.J., Shah, K.K., Mulhern, B.J., Pantiri, K. and van Hout, B., 2018. A New Method for Valuing Health: Directly Eliciting Personal Utility Functions. European Journal of Health Economics. DOI | RePEc