PURPOSE: This workshop will give attendees insights into designing preference studies and communicating results to inform public-health decision making.

DESCRIPTION: Background: Recent controversies regarding the timing and extent of pandemic-related public-health measures have highlighted common challenges facing officials across a wide range of policy contexts. Even with accurate information on policy consequences, elected officials and public-health experts often lack crucial data on societal values necessary to inform the difficult decisions they are facing. Decision makers need objective information about the public’s willingness to accept tradeoffs among health, economic impacts, and competing priorities for limited budgets. In the absence of such information, decision makers implicitly apply their own personal values which can be influenced by unrepresentative stakeholder perspectives, stories in the press or on social media, or public-opinion surveys. Attendees will learn how to identify policy-relevant questions and how to design, execute, and disseminate results to inform health policy decisions. Discussion leaders will share lessons learned on the impact of several studies, what researchers can do to improve uptake, and what design tradeoffs could be necessary to produce results quickly enough for time-sensitive decision making. Successful policy-relevant stated-preference research includes identifying preference-sensitive policy problems, quantifying heterogeneity in policy-relevant populations, including demographics, geography, and political views, and communicating results effectively to decision makers. Discussion leaders: Reed Johnson will share lessons learned from a stated-preference study designed to prioritize expenditures on health and non-health programs. Shelby Reed will discuss challenges in producing policy-relevant benefit-risk preference data under time and resource limitations at the onset of the pandemic in the U.S. Axel Mühlbacher will review how stated-preference data has informed regulatory decision making in Germany. Marcel Jonker will describe a highly publicized study in the Netherlands of public preferences for a COVID-19 contact-tracing app.