Scarcity
The fundamental economic condition in which available resources are insufficient to satisfy all competing wants and needs.
Encyclopaedia
Explore comprehensive, evidence-informed explanations of key health economics concepts, including their development, application and relationships to other concepts. Published entries are validated through human expert review.
Scope Efficiency
A measure of whether producing multiple services jointly within one organisation is more efficient than producing them separately across different organisations.
Screening Theory
A body of theory analysing how an uninformed party can design a menu of options that leads individuals to reveal their private information through choice.
Sensitivity to Change
The capacity of a health outcome measure to register a difference in health status when a real change has occurred in a patient's condition.
Separating Equilibrium
A market outcome in which different risk types choose different options, revealing their true type to the other party in the transaction.
Shadow Price
The implicit value of a resource with no observable market price, reflecting the opportunity cost of using it in a particular way.
Shadow Price of Health
The implicit value of health gains forgone when a health budget is spent inefficiently, used as a basis for setting a cost-effectiveness threshold.
Signaling
An action taken by an informed party to credibly convey private information to an uninformed party that could not otherwise be verified.
Signaling Theory
A body of theory analysing how individuals with private information take costly actions to credibly reveal it in markets with information asymmetry.
Single Attribute Utility
A utility value derived from a single dimension of health or outcome, unlike multi-attribute utility, which integrates several dimensions.
Social Return on Investment
A framework extending conventional return on investment analysis by monetising broader social, environmental, and health outcomes alongside financial returns.
Social Welfare Function
A mathematical representation of how individual wellbeing combines into overall social welfare, embodying explicit judgements about equality versus total welfare.
Standard Costing
A costing method that assigns predetermined, expected costs to services based on historical or engineered estimates rather than actual costs incurred.
Standard Gamble
A health state valuation method in which respondents choose between a defined health state with certainty or a gamble between full health and death.
Standardised Response Mean
A responsiveness statistic calculated as the mean score change over time divided by the standard deviation of that change, unlike an effect size.
Step-Down Allocation
A method of allocating support department costs to operating departments in sequence, so that once allocated, no further costs return to that department.
Strict Dominance
A situation where one intervention is unambiguously better than another because it is both less costly and more effective.
Suits Index
A measure of the progressivity of a tax or financing system, using a concentration curve plotting cumulative tax burden against cumulative income.
Sullivan Method
A technique for calculating health expectancy measures by combining age-specific mortality rates from a life table with age-specific prevalence rates of disability.
Supplier-Induced Demand
The phenomenon in which providers, using their informational advantage, influence the quantity or type of care demanded beyond what informed patients would choose.