The Reduction of compound lotteries is an implicit assumption both in the statement of the St. Petersburg Paradox as well as in its resolution by Expected Utility (EU). Yet despite the pivotal role of this assumption, to date there has been no empirical substantiation of its validity. Here we...

The St. Petersburg paradox is one of the oldest challenges of expected value theory. Thus far, explanations of the paradox aim at small probabilities being perceived as zero and the boundedness of utility of the outcome. This paper provides experimental results showing that neither diminishing...