UNCERTAINTY AND THE DECISION MAKER: ASSESSING AND MANAGING THE RISK OF UNDESIRABLE OUTCOMES

We present an approach to rank order new programs in ways that accommodate uncertainty of different outcomes occurring, on the basis of the size and nature ('bad' or 'good') of those outcomes. This represents an improvement on the way uncertainty has been accommodated in existing approaches (e.g., threshold approach to cost-effectiveness analysis). We illustrate the approach using the decision making plane, which explicitly incorporates …