2019-05-01
Unbiased assessment of disease surveillance utilities
Publication
Publication
A prospect theory application
PL o S Neglected Tropical Diseases (Online) , Volume 13 - Issue 5
Objectives
We contribute a new methodological approach to the ongoing efforts towards evaluating
public health surveillance. Specifically, we apply a descriptive framework, grounded in prospect
theory (PT), for the evaluation of decisions on disease surveillance deployment. We
focus on two attributes of any surveillance system: timeliness, and false positive rate (FPR).
Methods
In a sample of 69 health professionals from a number of health related networks polled
online, we elicited PT preferences, specifically respondents’ attitudes towards gains, losses
and probabilities (i.e., if they overweight or underweight extreme probabilities) by means of
a series of lotteries for either timeliness or FPR. Moreover, we estimated willingness to pay
(WTP) for improvements in the two surveillance attributes. For contextualization, we apply
our framework to rabies surveillance.
Results
Our data reveal considerable probability weighting, both for gains and losses. In other
words, respondents underestimate their chances of getting a good outcome in uncertain situations,
and they overestimate their chances of bad outcomes. Moreover, there is convex
utility for losses and loss aversion, that is, losses loom larger than gains of the same absolute
magnitude to the respondents. We find no differences between the estimated parameters
for timeliness and FPR. The median WTP is $7,250 per day gained in detection time
and $30 per 1/10,000 reduction in FPR.
Conclusion
Our results indicate that the biases described by PT are present among public health professionals,
which highlights the need to incorporate a PT framework when eliciting their preferences
for surveillance systems.
Additional Metadata | |
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doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0007364, hdl.handle.net/1765/116350 | |
PL o S Neglected Tropical Diseases (Online) | |
Organisation | Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (ESHPM) |
Attema, A., He, L., Cook, A., & Del Rio Vilas, V. (2019). Unbiased assessment of disease surveillance utilities. PL o S Neglected Tropical Diseases (Online), 13(5). doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0007364 |