Discrete choice experiments and choice models in health

Date and time:  Tuesday 25 February, 13:00 hours

Location: LG0 Seminar Room, Big Data Institute, Old Road Campus, Headington, OX3 7LF

To Join: This is a free event, which will be taking place both in-person and online via Microsoft Teams. Register

Please join us on the 25^th of February for a HERC seminar showcasing our team’s work on Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE) and choice modelling in health. This event will feature presentations from John Buckell, Sarah Wordsworth, Oliver Rivero-Arias, Liz Morrell, Xiaowen Du, Madison Luick, and Thomas Hancock.

The presentations will cover HERC’s range of applied and methodological work. We use DCEs to measure choice behaviours in various populations. Understanding these behaviours is useful for a variety of purposes, including, but not limited to, informing policy questions or clinical processes; estimating non-inferiority margins for clinical trials; non-market valuation; value sets for quality of life; and documenting risky health behaviours. Our collaborations with a range of clinicians, trialists, and other experts, combined with best research practices, generate robust datasets in these fields. We use these data with advanced choice models and together with revealed preference and/or simulated data where possible. Alongside applications, we are conducting methods-based research to tackle health-specific problems, and to ask if we can improve our modelling practices.

The following topics will be discussed:

• Estimating GPs’ reimbursement elasticity of c-reactive protein tests in primary care
• When is a DCE not a DCE? Choice experiments with a single profile and multiple actions
• Participation in clinical trial during pregnancy and for neonates in the UK
• Valuing child health for decision-making: introducing kaizen tasks - a novel DCE alternative
• Please don't label me! Discrete mixtures in place of latent classes to capture preference heterogeneity

Some previous research from our team can be found in the following links:

• Meester DAJ, Hess S, Buckell J, Hancock TO. Can decision field theory enhance our understanding of health-based choices? Evidence from risky health behaviors. Health Economics. 2023;32(8):1710-32.
• Rivero-Arias O, Buckell J, Knight M, Craig BM, Ramakrishnan R, Kenny S, et al. Defining treatment success in children with surgical conditions. Archives of Disease in Childhood. 2024;109(5):377.
• Morrell L, Buchanan J, Rees S, Barker RW, Wordsworth S. What Aspects of Illness Influence Public Preferences for Healthcare Priority Setting? A Discrete Choice Experiment in the UK. PharmacoEconomics. 2021;39(12):1443-54.
• Buckell J, Vasavada V, Wordsworth S, Regier DA, Quaife M. Utility maximization versus regret minimization in health choice behavior: Evidence from four datasets. Health Economics. 2022;31(2):363-81.

The seminar will be held in the BDI LG Conference Room, Richard Doll Building from 13:00  to 15:30, after which there will be an opportunity to continue the conversation.