Dominance
A relationship between two interventions in which one is both less costly and more effective, making the other an inferior choice regardless of threshold.
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.
Dominance Analysis
The systematic process of comparing interventions to identify which are dominated, strictly or through extended dominance, before calculating incremental cost-effectiveness ratios.
Economic Evaluation
Economic evaluation compares the costs and outcomes of healthcare alternatives to inform decisions about value and limited resource allocation.
Efficiency
Efficiency describes how well scarce resources are used to produce valued outputs or outcomes, including whether resources are used without avoidable waste and whether they are allocated among competing uses in a way that best advances stated objectives.
Efficiency Frontier
The boundary formed by non-dominated interventions plotted by cost and effect, showing the best attainable outcome at each level of spending.
Efficiency Frontier Analysis
A method identifying the best-observed combinations of inputs and outputs among comparable units, forming a frontier against which all others are benchmarked.
Efficiency Frontier Method
An analytical approach that identifies the efficiency frontier among a set of interventions to determine which non-dominated options warrant incremental comparison.
Efficient Design
An experimental design built to maximise the statistical information obtained from a given number of choice tasks.
Elastic Demand
A condition in which quantity demanded changes proportionally more than a given price change, indicating consumers are relatively sensitive to price.
Equilibrium Price
The price at which the quantity consumers wish to buy equals the quantity producers wish to sell, clearing the market.
Equity
The principle of fairness in the distribution of health, healthcare, and the resources and opportunities that shape them, recognising that different needs may justify different treatment.
Equity-Weighted Analysis
An economic evaluation that applies differential weights to health gains in different population groups, giving greater weight to gains for disadvantaged groups.
Equivalent Variation
A monetary measure of the change in wellbeing from a price or policy change, the sum needed before the change to match post-change welfare.
Expansion Path
The set of cost-minimising input combinations as output rises, holding relative input prices constant.
Expected Loss
The probability-weighted average cost of making an incorrect decision under uncertainty, calculated across all possible states and their probabilities.
Expected Net Benefit
Expected net benefit is the average net benefit of an alternative across the uncertainty represented in an economic evaluation, calculated at a stated cost-effectiveness threshold.
Expected Value Analysis
An approach to decision-making under uncertainty that evaluates options based on the probability-weighted average of their possible outcomes.
Experimental Design
The systematic planning of an empirical study to allow valid causal inference, including decisions about randomisation, control groups, and study conditions.
Extended Cost-Effectiveness
A form of economic evaluation that extends standard cost-effectiveness analysis by incorporating financial risk protection and the distribution of costs and benefits by income.
Extended Dominance
A situation where an intervention is not dominated by any single alternative but is inferior to a combination of two other options.