RISKY DECISION-MAKING AND ALLOCATION OF RESOURCES FOR LEUKEMIA AND AIDS PROGRAMS

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