On the expected number of successes in a sequence of nested Bernoulli trials

We analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the probability of observing the expected number of successes at each stage of a sequence of nested Bernoulli trials. Our motivation is the desire to give a genuinely frequentist interpretation for the notion of probability based on finite sample sizes. The main result is that the probabilities under consideration decay asymptotically as n−1/3, where n is the common length of the Bernoulli trials. The main ingredient in the proof is a new fixed-point theorem for non-contractive symmetric functions on the unit interval.