Measuring the social importance of concentration or dispersion of individual health benefits

Abstract In this paper we address the importance of distributive preferences in the social valuation of quality‐adjusted life years (QALYs). We propose a social welfare function that generalises the functions traditionally used in the health economic literature. The novelty is that, depending on the individual health gains, this function can represent either preferences for concentrating or preferences for spreading total gain or both together, an issue which has not been addressed until now. Based on an experiment, we observe that this generalisation provides a suitable approximation to the sampled social preferences. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.