What happens to value of information measures as the number of decision options increases?
✍ Scribed by Pelham Barton
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 142 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1057-9230
- DOI
- 10.1002/hec.1651
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Aim:
To explore what happens to the expected value of perfect information (EVPI) as an increasingly large number of decision options is considered.
Methods: A stylised model of screening for a hypothetical cancer. The model was used to test different possible ages for 'once in a lifetime' screening under a variety of assumptions about model parameter uncertainty. Initial model runs only considered screening at ages which are multiples of 16 years, then multiples of 8 years were allowed, then 4 years, etc.
Results: Effects of more refined choice sets on the cost-effectiveness acceptability frontier (CEAF) and EVPI are shown. The CEAF collapses to zero for threshold incremental cost-effectiveness ratios at which screening at some age is preferred to no screening, while the EVPI stabilises at a non-zero figure.
Conclusions: The CEAF is likely to be highly dependent on the choice of options when these are a selection from a very large set of possible options. In contrast, the EVPI can be reasonably approximated by a model with a slightly limited choice set.