Cost‐effectiveness analysis with risk aversion
论证了医疗决策中社会规划者风险中性假设的不合理性，并构建了风险厌恶下的成本效果分析框架，发现风险中性方法可能错误批准或拒绝医疗干预，通过两个案例展示了风险厌恶参数对决策的影响。
This paper discusses why, in a medical context, the standard assumption of a risk-neutral social planner is inappropriate and develops a framework for conducting cost-effectiveness (CE) analysis when social planners are risk-averse. This framework demonstrates that if new medical interventions are variance increasing (decreasing), the risk-neutral approach will approve (reject) projects that should be rejected (accepted). This methodology is applied to two medical interventions that have been previously evaluated and considered cost-effective in the published literature. Since both conclusions assumed risk neutrality we determine the level of societal risk-aversion that would be necessary to reject these new interventions and compare these levels to previous estimates of risk-aversion in the economics literature. We find that for reasonable values of the risk-aversion parameter, only one of the two interventions should be approved. It is our recommendation that the cut-off risk aversion parameter (the level of risk-aversion above which a project would be rejected) should become a standard reported figure in future CE studies.