High quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are generally used to judge the affect of latest medical applied sciences on affected person mortality and morbidity. Nonetheless, use of QALYs
Many authors have mentioned the truth that normal 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) in an effort to quantify affected person preferences over therapies for main depressive dysfunction (MDD) in an effort to check for diminishing marginal utility and path dependence. Within the research, they supplied 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 information from 751 respondents with MDD.
Utilizing this method, they discovered that:
Per 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 typical time discounting by specializing in brief 6-week remedy durations
The authors argue that the brief timeframe they current (6 weeks) implies that discounting isn’t a difficulty. If people didn’t absolutely admire the timing was weeks–as an alternative simply thought-about generic time intervals–then discounting may 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 affect 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 may learn the complete paper right here.