ABSTRACT
Value elicitation is also used in priority-setting exercises among professionals and within the private sector. To avoid problems associated with ‘conventional’ ranking of issues, in particular the elimination of minority views, in the third workshop participants analysed the relationships between issues in two interaction matrices containing problems and opportunities, apparently using a cross-impact approach. Ranking, often accompanied by the calculation of mean rank positions, is probably the most common technique and appears in many studies in many different fields. Accompanying discussion exhibits varying degrees of comprehension of the implications of this deceptively simple approach. Values are involved in the construction of health status indices, which can be used in economic appraisal and priority setting in the form of quality-adjusted life year (QALY) or similar measures. In addition to the never-ending debate about whose values should be used, there is widespread debate on the methodologies used for eliciting and aggregating values.
