The St. Petersburg paradox is a centuries‐old philosophical puzzle concerning a lottery with infinite expected payoff for which people are only willing to pay a small amount to play. Despite many attempts and several proposals, no generally accepted resolution is yet at hand. In this work, we present the first resource‐rational, process‐level explanation of this paradox, demonstrating that it can be accounted for by a variant of normative expected utility valuation which acknowledges cognitive limitations. Specifically, we show that Nobandegani et al.'s (2018) metacognitively rational model, sample‐based expected utility (SbEU), can account for major experimental findings on this paradox. Crucially, our resolution is consistent with two empirically well‐supported assumptions: (a) People use only a few samples in probabilistic judgments and decision‐making, and (b) people tend to overestimate the probability of extreme events in their judgment. Our work seeks to understand the St. Petersburg gamble as a particularly risky gamble whose process‐level explanation is consistent with a broader process‐level model of human decision‐making under risk.

中文翻译：

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圣彼得堡悖论的资源理性，过程层次的描述

圣彼得堡悖论是一个具有数百年历史的哲学难题，涉及到彩票，其预期收益是无限的，人们只愿意为此支付少量钱即可玩游戏。尽管进行了许多尝试和提出了一些建议，但目前尚没有公认的解决方案。在这项工作中，我们提出了这一悖论的第一个资源合理，过程层次的解释，表明可以通过承认认知局限性的规范性预期效用评估来解决这一矛盾。具体而言，我们表明Nobandegani等人（2018）的元认知理性模型，基于样本的预期效用（SbEU），可以解释有关此悖论的主要实验结果。至关重要的是，我们的解决方案与两个经验支持的假设相符：（a）人们在概率判断和决策中仅使用一些样本，并且（b）人们倾向于在其判断中高估极端事件的概率。我们的工作旨在将圣彼得堡赌博理解为一种特别冒险的赌博，其过程级别的解释与处于风险中的人类决策的更广泛的过程级别模型相一致。