Dr Genie

Mesfin Genie, Senior Lecturer in Health Economics, University of Newcastle

I measure what people are willing to give up. Patients trade waiting time against cost, side effects against survival. Governments make the same trades on their behalf and rarely say so out loud.

My work puts numbers on those trades, then asks the harder question: whether the numbers mean anything when the person answering has read only half the information. That is why I run eye trackers alongside surveys.

Papers · Tools · CV · mesfin.genie@newcastle.edu.au

Try it: three questions, and I will price your patience

Question 1 of 3

Two clinics can see you. They are alike except for these two things. Which do you book?

Attribute

Clinic A

Clinic B

Wait

2 weeks

6 weeks

Cost to you

$80

No cost

What your answers imply

$0$150$300+

How this works read more

Each question moved the price up or down depending on your last answer, so three choices bracket the point where you switch. A real discrete choice experiment does this across hundreds of people and six or seven attributes at once, and estimates the switching point rather than bracketing it.

Recent papers

• 2026

  Fit for purpose? Discrete choice experiment designs for evolving health technologies

  Social Science & Medicine

  A design freezes a technology at the moment it was written. When the technology moves on, the design can quietly stop measuring the thing it was built for.

  DOI

• 2026

  Guidance or misdirection? Feedback in health preference assessments

  Health Economics

  626 heart failure patients faced a task where every option was worse than nothing. Telling half of them so changed the choices that followed.

  DOI

• 2026

  An open repository of COVID-19 vaccine mandate studies

  npj Vaccines

  The evidence sat across four disciplines in formats that would not compare. Now it is one repository others can extend.

  DOI

All 44 papers

Tools

• Policy

  eMANDEVAL

  Compare vaccine mandate designs on predicted public support.

• Costing

  STEPS

  Plan field epidemiology training scale-up. Built with the World Bank.

• Appraisal

  Farming benefit-cost tool

  Soil and farming appraisal with the assumptions exposed.

Latest writing

• Why the other queue always moves fasterIt does not. You only remember the times it did.
• Why ten thousand stepsA 1965 pedometer advert that became everyone's goal
• Why you keep watching a bad movieSunk costs, and the receipt that does your deciding

All writing

Students

I supervise work on choice experiments, eye tracking and outcomes measurement. Read what to send before you write. Courses are under teaching.