Malmquist Index
A productivity measure decomposing efficiency change over time into genuine technical progress versus change relative to an evolving best-practice frontier.
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.
Mapping Algorithm
A statistical model predicting a health utility value from responses on a non-preference-based instrument, used when a preference-based measure was not collected.
Mapping Function
The specific statistical relationship, typically estimated through regression, used within a mapping algorithm to convert a health status score into a predicted utility value.
Marginal Analysis
An approach to resource allocation examining the additional cost and benefit of small changes in an activity's level, rather than its total cost and benefit.
Marginal Benefit
The additional benefit gained from one more unit of a good, service, or activity.
Marginal Cost
The additional cost incurred in producing one more unit of a good or service.
Marginal Cost Estimation
The process of estimating the additional cost of producing one more unit of a good or service at the current level of output.
Marginal Cost of Healthcare
The additional cost of providing one more unit of healthcare service, such as treating one further patient.
Marginal Cost-Effectiveness
The additional cost required to produce one more unit of health effect at the margin of an intervention's current scale, distinct from its average.
Marginal Rate of Substitution
The rate at which a consumer is willing to trade one good for another while keeping the same overall level of satisfaction.
Market Clearing
A condition in which price has adjusted so that quantity supplied exactly equals quantity demanded, eliminating any surplus or shortage.
Market Equilibrium
A state in which the quantity of a good supplied equals the quantity demanded at the prevailing price, with no tendency to change.
Market Failure
A market failure occurs when market exchange does not produce an efficient allocation of resources because prices or incentives fail to reflect relevant costs, benefits, information or competitive conditions.
Markov Assumption
The defining property of a Markov model that the probability of a future transition depends only on the current state, not on prior history.
Markov Chain
A mathematical sequence of states in which the probability of moving to any next state depends only on the current state.
Markov Chain Monte Carlo
A class of algorithms generating samples from a complex probability distribution by constructing a Markov chain that converges to that distribution.
Markov Cohort Model
A Markov model tracking a hypothetical cohort collectively as proportions across health states over cycles, rather than simulating each patient separately.
Markov Microsimulation
A Markov model simulating individual patients one at a time through their health state history, capturing heterogeneity a cohort model cannot represent.
Markov Model
A Markov model is a state-transition model in which a cohort or individuals move among mutually exclusive health states over repeated cycles, with future transitions determined by the current state under the model’s memory assumptions.
Martingale Residual
A residual used to diagnose the fit of a Cox model, checking the functional form of continuous covariates and identifying influential observations.