Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
Preference elicitation tasks for better than dead (BTD) and worse than dead (WTD) health states vary in the conventional time trade‐off (TTO) procedure, casting doubt on uniformity of scale. ‘Lead time TTO’ (LT‐TTO) was recently introduced to overcome the problem. We tested different specifications of LT‐TTO in comparison with TTO in a within‐subject design. We elicited preferences for six health states and employed an intertemporal ranking task as a benchmark to test the validity of the two methods. We also tested constant proportional trade‐offs (CPTO), while correcting for discounting, and the effect of extending the lead time if a health state is considered substantially WTD. LT‐TTO produced lower values for BTD states and higher values for WTD states. The validity of CPTO varied across tasks, but it was higher for LT‐TTO than for TTO. Results indicate that the ratio of lead time to disease time has a greater impact on results than the total duration of the time frame. The intertemporal ranking task could not discriminate between TTO and LT‐TTO. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.