Utility Measurement in Public Health Decision Making

Abstract

The Churchman-Ackoff approximate measure of value method was used successfully to measure the utilities of objectives of decision makers in a large public health agency. The utilities thus obtained formed part of a model of a resource allocation problem faced by the agency in its role as allocator of a federal grant. A comparison of the normative solution derived from the model with the solution already decided upon by the agency tended to support the hypothesis that the members of the agency chose among alternatives as if they were maximizing expected utility.