The point is that people are told that the risk of death is the same in both cases, and either way, they're deciding between the same chance of loss of life, or

The point is that people are told that the risk of death is the same in both cases, and either way, they're deciding between the same chance of loss of life, or certain loss of money, but they respond differently depending on how it is phrased - whether they would be losing or gaining the money in exchange for taking (or not taking) the risk. What I see as the inequivalence is that in the first case, they're gaining a cure either way (if it doesn't kill them). (Although it doesn't say what would be cured - I wonder whether most people assumed a terminal illness vs. some minor ailment?) But in the second scenario, they're not gaining anything but the money. So it becomes a 99.9% chance of curing something that you want to cure (possibly terminal) vs a 0.1% chance of dying for nothing but money when you weren't even sick. I wonder if death isn't the biggest skew though. When pharmaceuticals are mentioned, I think of weight loss, impotence, and cosmetics industries. It would be interesting to see the outcome of replicating the experiment for each of those compared to actual industry profits of each. If a group of people pay more to try to be attractive than they do to delay death, would their experimental responses to risk match the observed facts of their actual behavior? Are most people acting irrationally (in the Economics sense)? And if so, what would that tell us about the risk studies?