This is hardly a paradox anymore. It only appears to be one if you accept "maximize accepted utility" as the decision metric. Maximizing expected utility is a

This is hardly a paradox anymore. It only appears to be one if you accept "maximize accepted utility" as the decision metric. Maximizing expected utility is a pretty good decision metric, but it has problems. Specifically, it has huge problems in handling very-low-probability-very-high-payoff outcomes. Here's a simple example: Game 1: You get $1.00 Game 2: 99.999% chance of getting nothing. 0.001% chance of getting $100,000.00 The expected payoff in each is the same but they are clearly very different. Note: I realize I'm equating money with utility here. Just doing it for simplicity, you can replace with whatever you want to get a utility of 1 and 100,000 respectively. Note 2: You can argue that utility is bounded (say between 0 and 1). But I don't think this solves the problem.