Patients' wellbeing often depends on making the right decision with regards to their healthcare treatment and other decisions relating to their health care or finances in terms of their end of life. If they are unable to make decisions for themselves, other people have to make those decisions on their behalf. This important task is described in literature as surrogate decision making. We survey and illustrate several important issues that are associated with surrogate decision making and

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... an overview of the factors that have been found to affect its accuracy. Selection of a surrogate decision maker has been found to be affected by the beneficiary's nationality, risk attitudes, and personality and by specific qualities of the surrogate. Decision accuracy (as indexed by matching between choices for self or relative) has been found to be affected by factors such as nationality, surrogate qualities, surrogate person choice, risk attitudes and personality.