High quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are generally used to judge the influence of latest medical applied sciences on affected person mortality and morbidity. Nonetheless, use of QALYs
Many authors have mentioned the truth that customary assumptions lead to utility features which might be unrealistically linear and separable, overlooking the diminishing marginal utility a basic property of utility features in economics.
A paper by Johnson et al. (2024) conduct a discrete-choice experiment (DCE) so as to quantify affected person preferences over therapies for main depressive dysfunction (MDD) so as to take a look at for diminishing marginal utility and path dependence. Within the examine, they supplied respondents totally different signs sequences of extreme, reasonable and gentle melancholy and estimated a willingness to pay for every. A deductive latent-class mixed-logit evaluation was used to judge survey information from 751 respondents with MDD.
Utilizing this method, they discovered that:
According to theoretical expectations, we discovered proof of diminishing marginal utility,
holding sequence timing fixed, in addition to proof of path dependence, holding symptom enchancment fixed. Our experiment remoted the consequences of path dependence from the affect of standard time discounting by specializing in brief 6-week therapy durations
The authors argue that the brief timeframe they current (6 weeks) signifies that discounting isn’t a problem. If people didn’t absolutely respect the timing was weeks–as an alternative simply thought-about generic time durations–then discounting might have performed a task right here. Nonetheless, assuming that respondents did correctly perceive the character of the query, low cost charges would have a really small influence over 6 weeks and the findings will be attributable to non-linear utilities. This can be significantly related for therapies with fast-acting mechanisms of motion. You’ll be able to learn the complete paper right here.
