An Instrument for Measuring the Social Willingness to Pay for Health State Improvement

Abstract

This paper describes an instrument for measuring the social value of changes in health status, the Relative Social Willingness to Pay. It is a unique combination of measurement attributes designed to minimise cognitive complexity and provide an additional option for measuring 'social value'. Similar to the person trade-off (PTO), it adopts a social perspective and asks respondents to evaluate programmes on behalf of society. Unlike the PTO, trade-offs between the options use dollars, not numbers of patients. Respondents are not, however, asked for their personal willingness to pay. Rather, the opportunity cost of funds spent on one service is as an offsetting reduction in funds for a second service. The amount spent on each service therefore indicates relative, not absolute, value. However, the two services combine to produce one Quality adjusted life year which allows the calculation of a Quality adjusted life year-like unit of social value on a 0-1 scale. A three-stage survey was used to test the instrument's reliability, validity and sensitivity to the framing of the main question. Results indicate that the Relative Social Willingness to Pay produces values similar to but less than the PTO and time trade-off techniques.

Sharing and the Provision of “Cost-Ineffective” Life-Extending Services to Less Severely Ill Patients

“…Budgetary allocation between two options-CSPC analyses-has also been used in the health sector a number of times [11,16,22,[25][26][27]. Its use has been directly compared with time trade-off and person trade-off [28,29] and with discrete choice experiment [30,31]. Carson and Louviere [32] argue that CSPC is consistent with random utility theory and a number of methodological reviews of its use have been published [6,7,31].…”

Cost-Value Analysis of Health Interventions: Introduction and Update on Methods and Preference Data

“…More recent approaches to including societal values in formal economic evaluation include Richardson et al's [28] 'social cost-utility analysis' (http://www.ispor.org/ EducationalVideos/Preferences/JeffRichardson-2012/Jeff Richardson-2012.htm) and 'relative social willingness to pay'. In the latter, respondents are asked to evaluate programs on behalf of society.…”

A Theory of Impact Bonds as an Alternative to Pigouvian Tax and Public Provision: Application for Climate Change

“…Third, pricing externalities at the societal level should reduce political obstacles to imposing costs by spreading and abstracting the pricing process. If society was willing to pay for healthcare and environmental quality on a per-unit basis, economists would not have spent as much effort building processes to measure social prices for them (Richardson, et al, 2014;Orchard-Webb, et al, 2016).…”