Helen Colby

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Kelley School of Business

The allocation of scarce public resources such as transplant organs and limited public funding involves a trade-off between equality—equal access and efficiency—maximizing total benefit. The current research explores how preferences shift when allocation decisions involve human lives versus when they do not. Fifteen experiments test this question u...

The effectiveness of a pedometer intervention was affected by manipulating the goals given to participants and by providing social comparison feedback about how participants' performance compared with others. In study 1 (n = 148), university staff members received a low, medium, or high walking goal (10%, 50%, or 100% increase over baseline walking...

Decisions about allocation of scarce resources, such as transplant organs, often entail a trade-off between efficiency (i.e., maximizing the total benefit) and fairness (i.e., dividing resources equally). In three studies, we used a hypothetical scenario for transplant-organ allocation to examine allocation to groups versus individuals. Study 1 dem...

Decision makers often save money for a specific goal by forgoing discretionary consumption and instead putting the money toward the savings goal. We hypothesized that reference points can be exploited to enhance this type of saving. In two hypothetical scenario studies, subjects made judgments of their likelihood to forgo a small expenditure in ord...