Contingent Valuation of Multiple Health Programs: Major Improvements or Major Biases?

Contingent valuation is the most flexible and controversial non-market valuation technique. One of the unresolved issues concerns the question of whether respondents are reminded of the economic constraints within which they should express their preferences. A study design which is appropriate for reminding economic constraints can be found in the use of joint evaluation (JE), i.e. evaluating simultaneously different programs in a single survey. The use of JE explicitly raises the question of the potential interdependence in the individuals' valuation of different programs. In the EuroWill project, three health programs were simultaneously evaluated and gave us the opportunity to test for functional relationships between the dependent WTP variables. On the basis of our results, we propose some perspectives for further research about the use of JE of different programs for economic evaluation of health benefits.