Risky Decision Making and Allocation of Resources for Leukemia and AIDS Programs

Abstract

Traditional judgment and decision-making paradigms were expanded to include differential reactions to persons with leukemia or AIDS. Experiments 1 and 2 adopted Tversky and Kahneman's risky-decision-making task and found support for different value functions for the 2 patient groups when choosing between treatment programs. From these results, the subjective value of saving a fixed number of lives appears to be greater for persons with leukemia than for persons with AIDS. Experiment 3 provided additional data concerning differential perceptions of the causes of AIDS. This proved to be a useful means of classifying Ss who did and did not devalue the lives of persons with AIDS.