CentralNotice St. Petersburg paradox From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search This article includes a list of references , related reading or external links , but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations . Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (October 2013) The St. Petersburg lottery or St. Petersburg paradox [ 1 ] is a paradox related to probability and decision theory in economics . It is based on a particular (theoretical) lottery game that leads to a random variable with infinite expected value (i.e., infinite expected payoff) but nevertheless seems to be worth only a very small amount to the participants. The St. Petersburg paradox is a situation where a naive decision criterion which takes only the expected value into account predicts a course of action that presumably no actual pers...