What is the value of social values? The uselessness of assessing health-related quality of life through preference measures

BACKGROUND: The use of preference-based measures in the evaluation of health outcomes has extended considerably over the last decade. Their alleged advantage over other types of general instruments in the evaluation of health related quality of life (HRQOL), supposedly lies in the fact that preference measures incorporate values or utilities that reflects the value of social preferences through health states. The objective of this study was to determine whether the use of social preference weights or utilities makes any real difference when calculating scores for the Euroqol (EQ5-D) questionnaire, a HRQOL preference-based measure. METHODS: Responses to the EQ5-D of a sample of 10,972 patients from 10 countries enrolled in an observational study of the treatment of schizophrenia in Europe were used for this purpose. Two different methods of scoring the EQ-5D where compared: 'weighting the items' of the questionnaire through the UK official weight coefficients, and 'non-weighting the items'. Pearson's, Spearman's, and two-way mixed parametric intraclass correlation coefficients were used to estimate the association of the scores obtained in both ways. RESULTS: The association between weighted and unweighted Euroqol scores was extremely high (Pearson's r = 0.91), as was the association between their ranks (Spearman's ρ = 0.93). The intraclass correlation coefficient obtained (0.89) also suggested that the concordance between the score distributions was prominent. CONCLUSIONS: A non-weighted approach to score the EQ5-D is enough to explain a high proportion of variance in scores obtained through the use of utilities. The differential contribution of weights based on population preference values is therefore minimal and, in our opinion, negligible

E-commerce transactions in a virtual environment: Virtual transactions

E-commerce is a fundamental method of doing business, such that for a firm to say it is trading at all in the modern market-place it must have some element of on-line presence. Coupled with this is the explosion of the "population" of Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games and other shared virtual environments. Many suggest this will lead to a further dimension of commerce: virtual commerce. We discuss here the issues, current roadblocks and present state of an e-commerce transaction carried out completely within a virtual environment; a virtual transaction. Although technically such transactions are in a sense trivial, they raise many other issues in complex ways thus making V-transactions a highly interesting cross-disciplinary issue. We also discuss the social, ethical and regulatory implications for the virtual communities in these environments of such v-transactions, how their implementation affects the nature and management of a virtual environment, and how they represent a fundamental merging of the real and virtual worlds for the purpose of commerce. We highlight the minimal set of features a v-transaction capable virtual environment requires and suggest a model of how in the medium term they could be carried out via a methodology we call click-through, and that the developers of such environments will need to take on the multi-modal behavior of their users, as well as elements of the economic and political sciences in order to fully realize the commercial potential of the v-transaction. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Perspectives on Risk Perceptions

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72341/1/j.1539-6924.1981.tb01409.x.pd

Investigating the Need for Eliminatory Constraints in the User Interface of Bicycle Route Planners

Abstract. According to choice models in economics, consumer choice can be modeled as a two-stage process, starting with the choice of feasible alternatives, called the screening process, followed by compensatory evaluation of the re-maining alternatives. Although spatial decision support systems used in various application areas support the screening process by allowing users to impose constraints on alternatives, this basic functionality is not widely available in current route planners. Based on an Internet survey of potential users, we exam-ine the need for screening functionality in route planners for cyclists. Part 1 of the survey examines the users ’ demand for context information before stating their route preferences. Part 2 and part 3 investigate the users ’ demand for con-straint functionality with and without context information. The results indicate that eliminatory constraints are essential concepts for the route selection proc-ess, and that maps are most effective in presenting context information about route alternatives