Dollars are fungible. If you expect to sometimes trade off risk vs. expected value, then you can aggregate all such events and act as if choosing your strategy for many or all of them at once.
So even if you don’t think you’ll be offered this particular gamble, as long as you expect to encounter other vaguely similar decisions, you should choose more high-risk, high-reward options. Unless, as others have pointed out, you can’t afford to take the financial risk in the short term.
But your position on the timeline is not. Context matters, even in the crude maximize-expected-utility approach because you need to know your wealth at the time of the decision.
Dollars are fungible. If you expect to sometimes trade off risk vs. expected value, then you can aggregate all such events and act as if choosing your strategy for many or all of them at once.
So even if you don’t think you’ll be offered this particular gamble, as long as you expect to encounter other vaguely similar decisions, you should choose more high-risk, high-reward options. Unless, as others have pointed out, you can’t afford to take the financial risk in the short term.
But your position on the timeline is not. Context matters, even in the crude maximize-expected-utility approach because you need to know your wealth at the time of the decision.