Decision makers who undertake health technology assessments such as those conducted by NICE, deliberatively consider a new technologies cost per QALY, alongside other criteria (such as, equity, whether treatment is lifesaving and patient experience, etc) which are not captured in incremental cost-effectiveness ratios alone. The intention to implement an explicit value based pricing scheme in the United Kingdom in 2014 has sparked a debate regarding which elements should be included in the assessment of value and how they should be combined and traded-off against each other. Of importance is consideration to how values should be derived to determine how different criteria should trade-off each other. This debate is timely given that even where price is considered to be fixed during the re-imbursement process (such as the current NICE process) such systems could be seen implicitly determining value based price and may influence pricing decisions. Using an example presented in a recent review or multi-criteria decision making (Thokala 2011) we compare four mechanisms by which different elements of value could be explicitly and deterministically traded-off in order to provide an overall estimate of a value based price. The mechanisms are: conventional cost per QALY; MCDA; adjusted QALY approach; adjusted threshold approach; and a net benefit approach. Hypothetical criteria incorporated into the decision making process include equity, innovation, patient compliance and the quality of evidence. Using these examples, we show that these methods are clearly related in that they ultimately require estimates of monetary value to be placed on each dimension of value, but may place different emphasis on the weightings given to specific elements and the potential interactions between different elements. The mechanism in which these monetary values are derived, must importantly reflect societies values in trading off additional criteria for overall health gains.