Measures of Mortality Risks (original) (raw)

A fundamental principle of psychophysics is that people's ability to discriminate change in a physical stimulus diminishes as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. We find that people also exhibit diminished sensitivity in valuing lifesaving interventions against a background of increasing numbers of lives at risk. We call this psychophysical numbing. Studies 1 and 2 found that an intervention saving a fixed number of lives was judged significantly more beneficial when fewer lives were at risk overall. Study 3 found that respondents wanted the minimum number of lives a medical treatment would have to save to merit a fixed amount of funding to be much greater for a disease with a larger number of potential victims than for a disease with a smaller number. The need to better understand the dynamics of psychophysical numbing and to determine its effects on decision making is discussed.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The African Refiners Association and the World Bank are working with other organizations and the governments of Sub-Saharan Africa to study the costs and benefits of reducing pollutant emissions from gasoline and diesel fuel. To support this ...

Acceptance of basic surgical care as an essential element of any properly functioning health system is growing. To justify investment in surgical interventions, donors require estimates of the economic benefit of treating surgical disease. The present study aimed to establish a methodology for valuing the potential economic benefit of surgical intervention using cleft lip and palate (CLP) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a model.

When constructs are positive in nature, individuals rating a set ofthem in terms of importance tend to end-pile their ratings toward thepositive end of the scale, resulting in little differentiation amongthe items rated. Results of two experiments indicate that a procedurewhere respondents first pick their most and least important items in aset and then rate the entire set of items (least-most) and aprocedure where respondents rank the items prior to rating(rank-then-rate) provide more differentiation and lessend-piling than a simple rating procedure (rate-only). Theresults also show that the increased differentiation for the least-mostmethod results in improved fit of latent structure, compared to arate-only procedure. These results generalize across two types ofpersonal values scales (Rokeach Value Survey and Kahle's List of Valuesscale), number of items rated (9 and 18) and number of rating points (1to 10 and 0 to 100).