High quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are generally used to judge the influence of recent medical applied sciences on affected person mortality and morbidity. Nonetheless, use of QALYs
Many authors have mentioned the truth that commonplace assumptions lead to utility features which can be unrealistically linear and separable, overlooking the diminishing marginal utility a elementary property of utility features in economics.
A paper by Johnson et al. (2024) conduct a discrete-choice experiment (DCE) as a way to quantify affected person preferences over therapies for main depressive dysfunction (MDD) as a way to take a look at for diminishing marginal utility and path dependence. Within the research, they provided respondents totally different signs sequences of extreme, reasonable and delicate despair and estimated a willingness to pay for every. A deductive latent-class mixed-logit evaluation was used to judge survey knowledge from 751 respondents with MDD.
Utilizing this method, they discovered that:
In step with 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 recognize the timing was weeks–as an alternative simply thought-about generic time durations–then discounting might have performed a job 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 may be attributable to non-linear utilities. This can be notably related for therapies with fast-acting mechanisms of motion. You’ll be able to learn the total paper right here.
