Willingness to pay... What???

Willingness to pay is a term used in economics, which can be defined as the maximum amount a person would be prepared to pay, sacrifice or exchange in order to receive goods or services or to avoid something that is undesired. It can be used in medicine as a method for assessing the value of health benefits in a cost-benefit analysis. One indication of the importance of this concept is the progressive appearance of this term in the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed database. The first appearance was in 1972, but it then remained uncommon, with less than 10 mentions per year until the 1990s. From 2000 to 2010, the numbers of appearances of this term grew from 69 times a year to 213 times a year. In 2013, this term appeared 355 times in the PubMed database. The greatest usages of willingness to pay within medicine are in Pharmacoeconomics and Health Economics. Nonetheless, this term can be a valuable addition within any field in which cost-benefit analysis is desired. Examples of this usage in 2013, retrieved from PubMed, include: a) Patients’ willingness to pay for Alzheimer’s disease medication in Canada.1 b) Parent preference in Switzerland for easy-to-use attributes of growth hormone injection devices quantified according to willingness to pay.2 c) Willingness to pay for anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.3