We revisit the saturated Compton cooling model of gamma-ray burst pulse decay in the context of cosmological scenarios. We find that for pulse duration of similar to 1 s, this model is consistent with Gpc distance if the Compton cooling plasma is a relativistically expanding thin shell of bulk Lorentz factor greater than or equal to 10(2), radius similar to 10(15) cm, thickness greater than or equal to 10(11)-10(12) cm, comoving lepton density greater than or equal to 10(13) cm(-3) and is dominated by a thermal population of keV comoving temperature, with less than a few percent nonthermal population.