Appraising the use of contingent valuation

Abstract

The valuation of treatments and health states has been pursued in a number of ways. Most predominant are contingent valuation (CV), QALYs, and HYEs. CV--that is, willingness to pay and willingness to accept--is the only one of these methods that can be consistent with welfare economic theory, but, as discussed by Gafni (1990), in order to do so three criteria must be met. This article argues that the fulfilment of these criteria is not sufficient to obtain useful results, and some additional criteria are suggested. Several CV studies carried out in the area of health are reviewed, and their compliance or non-compliance, with both sets of criteria, is discussed. Finally, it is argued that, although CV is the more theoretically correct method, it is not a superior tool to QALYs and HYEs, and that the decision as to which is the appropriate valuation method depends on the policy issue at hand.

Willingness to pay for health insurance among rural and poor persons: Field evidence from seven micro health insurance units in India

“…For this purpose, we used two proxy variables, namely declared HH income (which includes income from all sources both cash and kind) and declared non-health HH expenditure. 9 Results obtained by reference to both proxies were quite similar, and enhanced the confidence in the findings. The median WTP level expressed as percentage of HH income is 1.38% among the insured cohort and 1.27% among the uninsured cohort.…”

“…a certain product (in other cases this was equated to the minimum they are willing to accept in order to forgo the product) [8]. In the last 15 years, much has been published on the pros and cons of different variants of contingent valuation [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. It is claimed that questions referring to a starting price have yielded better results than open-ended questions [23].…”

A stated preference approach to assessing health care-quality improvements in Palestine: from theoretical validity to policy implications

“…However, it has been recognized (Arrow et al, 1993) that under certain conditions, CV can allow valid results. Except for the elicitation technique and the payment vehicle, our CV instrument adhered to the other recommended conditions (Gafni, 1991;Morrison and Gyldmark, 1992).…”

Health care contingent valuation studies: a review and classification of the literature

“…Although some reviews of the health care CVM literature have been published [3,14,15], these reviews have not been comprehensive and have mainly sought to highlight some methodologic points by reference to selected published studies.…”