Expected utility doesn’t say that you should buy a ticket, no. Obviously no. That would only hold if you assume that utility is either linear or superlinear in

Expected utility doesn’t say that you should buy a ticket, no. Obviously no. That would only hold if you assume that utility is either linear or superlinear in money (or, more precisely, that the marginal utility of losing a dollar, times 1-(1/1 million), plus the marginal utility of gaining a million dollars, divided by 1 million, is greater than 0) If this is the sort of argument that people advocating for EE are making, it makes EE seem less worthy of attention. Oh, you said EV not EU? Ok, but no one claims that people maximize expected money. That would be stupid. Using EU rather than E$ isn’t some hack to add a fudge factor, it is capturing that people have preferences about things in general, not merely how much money they have. Placing money centrally is silly; money isn’t some universal terminal goal. It is a convergent instrumental goal. Depending on what I care about, the use of money to me will scale differently, just like how the scale of other things to each-other will. The idea of utility is to pick the quantity which I do value linearly in probability. However I take probability into account, provided I do so in a coherent way, there is a unique-up-to-positive-affine-transformation utility function which corresponds to that.