Experimental estimation of preferences on population health ethics

We develop a novel social choice experiment capable of estimating preference parameters on population ethics. Our experiment poses three within-subject treatments in which participants allocate scarce resources to determine the health-related quality-of-life, and existence, of two population groups. Within a flexible social welfare function, we estimate participant-level preferences for inequality aversion, average vs total welfare maximisation, and minimum ‘critical level’ thresholds. By combining random behavioural and random utility models we also explicitly model ‘noise’ in decision making. Using a sample of British adults (n = 115, obs. = 5060), we find that 98.7% of respondents are inequality averse, prioritising the worst-off at the expense of efficiently maximising overall health. The modal group of participants (39.2%) maximise total welfare and have a critical level threshold of zero, however there is extensive heterogeneity in participants’ population preferences. We demonstrate how these preferences could be used to aid policymaking, where difficult trade-offs emerge between equity and efficiency, average and total welfare, and population sizes.