 Example. Suppose that the utility of money is linear in number of dollars: you value money at exactly its face value. Suppose now that you know that a fair coin will be tossed, and so you assign probability 1/2 to heads and 1/2 to tails. It costs a dollar to play the following game. If the coin lands heads, you will win $3; if it lands tails, you will get nothing.  (Including the initial cost of playing, the total possible payoffs are $1 less than these respective amounts.) Should you play? Here is the decision table: