On the expected number of successes in a sequence of nested Bernoulli trials

Abstract

We analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the probability of observing the expected number of successes at each stage of a sequence of nested Bernoulli trials. Our motivation is the attempt to give a genuinely frequentist interpretation to the notion of probability based on finite sample sizes. The main result is that the probabilities under consideration decay asymptotically as $n^{-1/3}$, where $n$ is the common length of the Bernoulli trials. The main ingredient in the proof is a new fixed-point theorem for non-contractive symmetric functions of the unit interval.