# Value of hope

Source: `R/value_of_hope.R`
`value_of_hope.Rd`

Compute the quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) that a patient would need to obtain to be indifferent between treatment sequences relative to a reference treatment sequence (i.e., compute the "certainty equivalent"), give differences in the distribution of QALYs.

    value_of_hope(econmod, comparator, crra = 0.39, dr = 0.03)

## Arguments

econmod | An economic model of class `"IndivCtstm"`. Disease progression must have been previously simulated (i.e., `$disprog_` cannot be `NULL`.)
comparator | The `strategy_id` from `econmod` to use as the comparator.
crra | Constant relative risk aversion parameter.
dr | Discount rate.

## Value

A `data.table` with columns:

strategy_id

  The treatment strategy ID.

comparator

  Equal to 1 if the treatment strategy is the comparator and 0 otherwise.

qalys

  Mean QALYs.

iqalys

  Incremental mean QALYs; that is, mean QALYs relative to the comparator.

ce

  The certainty equivalent.

voh

  The 'value of hope'. See 'Details'.

## Details

The value of hope is the difference between the certainty equivalent and differences in mean QALYs between a given treatment strategy and a comparator. That is, if \(\alpha\) is the certainty equivalent, then the value of hope for treatment strategy 2 relative to treatment strategy 1 is $$\alpha - (E[qalys_2] - E[qalys_1])$$.

## See also

See the example in the tutorial.