I agree, but only to the extent that we need to consider a cutoff somewhere for extraordinary bad luck. Maybe we only consider maximizing the well-being of the

I agree, but only to the extent that we need to consider a cutoff somewhere for extraordinary bad luck. Maybe we only consider maximizing the well-being of the 99.9% or the 99.99% of people like how we mostly ignore the maximum response time for a server in favor of looking at 95th percentile. Do you have any evidence for the claim that minmaxing causes a steep drop off in overall expected utility? I'm not sure if research has been done about this with traffic lights, but I think that could be a good case study about this. Minmax for traffic light timings would mean minimizing the maximum wait time at a traffic light, though I could see how such a strategy might hurt the overall throughput of the intersection. In the extreme case, you have one granny trying to cross a 6-lane stroad during rush hour; in the pure throughput model, the road would never stop for granny and in the minmax model, she would only need to wait about as long as it takes her to cross the road. Obviously, different models would still allow granny to cross the road eventually and maybe with less of a throughput hit than pure minmax. All of this is speculation though and I'm curious what the throughput hit would be for minmax.