At Summer School, the Centre’s Higher Degree Research (HDR) students were lucky enough to have a guest workshop by Health Economist Associate Professor John Bridges from the USA’s Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
John introduced the students discrete choice experiments - a method for eliciting preferences for different health states to use in economic analyses. John led an entertaining session somewhere between a statistics seminar and a magic show. Students called out their individual preferences between health states generated by the EuroQOL quality of life measure (EQ-5D) and John plugged them into an algorithm based on previous data. He showed that individual preferences are not as individual as we might think – most students conformed to one common pattern of preferences or another. Not afraid of controversy, John also questioned the substantial amount of evidence showing that preferences vary according to population characteristics such as culture. All in all, it was a thought-provoking and fun introduction to some big ideas with wide-ranging applicability.
