To appropriately weight dimensions of quality of life instruments for health economic evaluations, population and patient preferences need to be elicited. Two commonly used elicitation methods for this purpose are discrete choice experiments (DCE) and case 2 best-worst scaling (BWS). These methods differ in terms of their cognitive burden, which is especially relevant when eliciting preferences among older people. Using a randomised experiment with respondents from an online panel, this paper examines the cognitive burden associated with colour-coded and level overlapped DCE, colour-coded BWS, and ‘standard’ BWS choice tasks in a complex health state valuation setting. Our sample included 469 individuals aged 65 and above. Based on both revealed and stated cognitive burden, we found that the DCE tasks were less cognitively burdensome than case 2 BWS. Colour coding case 2 BWS cannot be recommended as its effect on cognitive burden was less clear and the colour coding lead to undesired choice heuristics. Our results have implications for future health state valuations of complex quality of life instruments and at least serve as an example of assessing cognitive burden associated with different types of choice experiments.

为了适当地权衡用于卫生经济评估的生活质量工具的尺寸，需要引起人群和患者的偏好。为此目的，两种常用的启发方法是离散选择实验（DCE）和案例2最坏定标（BWS）。这些方法的认知负担不同，这在引起老年人的偏爱时尤其重要。通过与来自在线小组的受访者进行的随机实验，本文研究了在复杂的健康状态评估设置中与颜色编码和水平重叠的DCE，颜色编码的BWS和“标准” BWS选择任务相关的认知负担。我们的样本包括469岁65岁及以上的人。根据揭示的和陈述的认知负担，我们发现DCE任务比案例2 BWS的认知负担少。不能推荐使用颜色编码案例2 BWS，因为它对认知负担的影响不太清楚，并且颜色编码会导致不良的选择启发式。我们的结果对复杂的生活质量工具的未来健康状态评估具有影响，并且至少可以作为评估与不同类型的选择实验相关的认知负担的示例。