MHE Seminar Series - Dr Matthew Robson

Title: A Fair Innings? Preferences for Prioritisation of the Less Healthy

Bio: Dr Matthew Robson is a Research Fellow at the Erasmus School of Economics. His research focuses on inequality, social preferences, and distributive justice, and draws upon experimental, health and welfare economics. Dr Robson designs experiments, estimates individual preferences, and identifies social value judgements which can be used to inform public policy. He also conducts applied econometric research on inequality and multidimensional poverty, in health and development.
Currently, Dr Robson works at Erasmus University Rotterdam, with Owen O’Donnell and Tom Van Ourti. Previously, he was at the University of York and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford.

Abstract: The fair innings principle prioritises healthcare for patients who would have fewer quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) without treatment. We gauge support for different interpretations and intensities of this prioritisation in a United Kingdom general public sample (n = 230). We use a novel localised convex budget-set experiment (observations = 20,700) to estimate participant-specific parameters of social welfare functions (SWFs) representing different interpretations of the principle. There is overwhelming support for the principle, broadly defined. Prioritarian SWFs, with continuously diminishing marginal welfare from QALYs, fit the data of most participants better than SWFs that are linear in QALYs up to a fair innings threshold at which there is a downward discontinuity in marginal welfare or linear SWFs with age-weights. We use the estimated parameters to obtain welfare weights by quality-adjusted life expectancy and illustrate their policy consequences.

Registration is required: https://go.unimelb.edu.au/k6cp

Contact: health-economics@unimelb.edu.au