St. Petersburg paradox

Rarity: Uncommon

A topic a little better known than average, read and translated beyond its own country.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Notion

Domain

Science and technology

In collections

Nobody has pulled it yet.

What Wikipedia says

The St. Petersburg paradox or St. Petersburg lottery is a paradox involving the game of flipping a coin where the expected payoff of the lottery game is infinite but nevertheless seems to be worth only a very small amount to the participants.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “St. Petersburg paradox”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: ICMA Photos, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.