Part of what makes this difficult is that money does not translate linearly to utilons. To put it a different way, the amount of work you’d be prepared to do to make a dollar depends very greatly on how many dollars you already have.
This is the reason most people would pick a 100% chance of a million dollars over a 1% chance of a billion.
The group who probably wouldn’t do so are bankers—they’d pick the 1% chance of a billion—but only because they know the overall bet, as a bet, is worth $10 million dollars as it stands, and they can sell on the whole thing as an investment to somebody else, and pocket the 10 million with 100% probability.
Part of what makes this difficult is that money does not translate linearly to utilons. To put it a different way, the amount of work you’d be prepared to do to make a dollar depends very greatly on how many dollars you already have.
This is the reason most people would pick a 100% chance of a million dollars over a 1% chance of a billion.
The group who probably wouldn’t do so are bankers—they’d pick the 1% chance of a billion—but only because they know the overall bet, as a bet, is worth $10 million dollars as it stands, and they can sell on the whole thing as an investment to somebody else, and pocket the 10 million with 100% probability.
Pocket some of the 10 million, anyway.