Informal evidence suggests that individuals are willing to pay only a finite and, typically, very low price for a specific lottery that converges to an infinite payment with probability one. The established decision theories (expected value, expected utility theory, cumulative prospect theory)...

Conventional parameterizations of cumulative prospect theory do not explain the St. Petersburg paradox. To do so, the power coefficient of an individual's utility function must be lower than the power coefficient of an individual's probability weighting function.

This paper proposes a new decision theory of how individuals make random errors when they compute the expected utility of risky lotteries. When distorted by errors, the expected utility of a lottery never exceeds (falls below) the utility of the highest (lowest) outcome. This assumption implies...