Comments
This draft is just a sketch that I hope to continue at some point. Not complete, not finished, mostly jotting down some thoughts. I think there's a lot to do in this area, and I'd love it if there'd be something like a roadmap.
How do we best take the resulting CE into account in decision-making?
https://osf.io/vk3bf/ Uncertainty quantification with experts: present status and research needs (2021)
Prior knowledge elicitation: The past, present, and future [review paper 2023]
The following is part of the work-in-progress economics research agenda[1] by the Global Priorities Institute, section 1.3 on "Conceptual issues in cost-effectiveness analysis", where they list four questions.
What is the distribution of cost-effectiveness?
The distribution of cost-effectiveness within and between charitable causes may have important implications for priority setting. For instance, it could provide a Bayesian prior for adjusting noisy cost-effectiveness estimates of interventions that have not yet been thoroughly evaluated. Empirically, what is the distribution of cost-effectiveness within and between the most impactful charitable causes, and what does this imply for priority setting? (Jamison et al. 2006; Vivalt 2015; 2020)
Accounting for externalities
Many interventions in global health and beyond have significant externalities on individuals other than the direct recipients of the intervention. How should such indirect effects be incorporated in cost-effectiveness analysis?
Comparing extending/creating life with improving life
How do social welfare gains from improvements in people’s quality of life (e.g. improvements in health or consumption) compare to social welfare gains from extending people’s lives or bringing new people into existence? (Cf. Luyten et al. 2022)
Metrics for health-related interventions - DALYs/WELLBYs
The cost-effectiveness of health interventions is often measured in terms of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per dollar. However, the DALY approach has well-known limitations, and there are other approaches such as using wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs) (e.g., Layard and Oparina 2021). How do these metrics differ in evaluations of cost-effectiveness of different interventions, and which metrics are most appropriate?
