Imagine you're playing Russian roulette. Case 1: a six-shooter contains four bullets, and you're asked how much you'll pay to remove one of them. Case 2: a six-shooter contains two bullets, and you're asked how much you'll pay to remove both of them. Steven Landsburg describes an argument by Richard Zeckhauser and Richard Jeffrey saying you should pay the same amount in both cases, provided that you don't have heirs and all your remaining money magically disappears when you die. What do you think?
if you just set up the lottery equivalences they simplify to U(life - $X) = U(life - $Y) pretty much implying that whatever the correct choices of X and Y happen to be, they're equal.
the setup is very dependent on the exact probabilities: if you change the cases to 10-shooters where you can remove one from five bullets or where you can remove two from two bullets, there's not a proof that the amounts you should pay are equal.
Imagine you're playing Russian roulette. Case 1: a six-shooter contains four bullets, and you're asked how much you'll pay to remove one of them. Case 2: a six-shooter contains two bullets, and you're asked how much you'll pay to remove both of them. Steven Landsburg describes an argument by Richard Zeckhauser and Richard Jeffrey saying you should pay the same amount in both cases, provided that you don't have heirs and all your remaining money magically disappears when you die. What do you think?