• Stefan A Lipman, BrouwerWerner B FWBFErasmus School of Health Policy & Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands., and Arthur E Attema.
• Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Electronic address: lipman@eshpm.eur.nl.
• Value Health. 2019 Jul 1; 22 (7): 816-821.

Background And ObjectivesCommon health state valuation methodology, such as time tradeoff (TTO) and standard gamble (SG), is typically applied under several descriptively invalid assumptions, for example, related to linear quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) or expected utility (EU) theory. Hence, the current use of results from health state valuation exercises may lead to biased QALY weights, which may in turn affect decisions based on economic evaluations using such weights. Methods have been proposed to correct responses for the biases associated with different health state valuation techniques. In this article we outline the relevance of prospect theory (PT), which has become the dominant descriptive alternative to EU, for health state valuations and economic evaluations.Methods And ResultsWe provide an overview of work in this field, which aims to remove biases from QALY weights. We label this "the corrective approach." By quantifying PT parameters, such as loss aversion, probability weighting, and nonlinear utility, it may be possible to correct TTO and SG responses for biases in an attempt to produce more valid estimates of preferences for health states. Through straightforward examples, this article illustrates the effects of this corrective approach and discusses several unresolved issues that currently limit the relevance of corrected weights for policy.ConclusionsSuggestions for research addressing these issues are provided. Nonetheless, if validly corrected health state valuations become available, we argue in favor of using these in economic evaluations.Copyright © 2019 ISPOR–The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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