A New Look at the St. Petersburg Paradox

The infinite expected value of the St. Petersburg Paradox has been a source of contention within probability theory since its inception in the early 18th century. This work has aimed to avoid supposition and instead has chosen to focus on empirical evidence generated through simulation. Armed with sufficient evidence, this work has modeled the sampling distribution of the St. Petersburg Paradox’s mean. This model allows a prospective gambler or casino owner to know whether to partake in the game at a given price. In addition, the resulting model has been discovered to be highly adaptable to other similar distributions. Potential applications of this work to earthquake magnitudes is also discussed. AMS 2010 subject classification: Primary 62F40; Secondary 62E17