Decision Making (or Why 12 People Don't Get Tapas)

[bennj]

Ryan, Lori's friend who is now working at Bridgewater Capital in Stamford, made a very interesting comment when we were sitting around ordering tapas. He said that when he went out with people from work, this process of collective ordering never happened. "Food just got ordered," he said. And it's funny, because it was what I was thinking but just

Comments

[dclayh]

It seems to me that if k/m (m the number of people) is >>1, as at a tapas place, then each person just orders k/m things he would like to eat (but everything gets shared anyway). This increases repetitions at the expense of marginal dishes, but makes everyone quite happy and is really simple.

[bennj]

You need k/m to be an integer. When you order 5 dishes for 3 people, how do you split up ordering?

Also, in general, people are reluctant to re-order dishes even if it's what they really like unless they also know it's a group favorite. Just an interesting social pressure.

[dclayh]

5/3 is not >>1 :) At a reasonable tapas place k/m should be in the area of 3 to 5, depending on the person and the particular dishes, and so rounding to an integer is much easier.

[tortoise]

Yeah, the real problem is when you're at a Chinese place and so k=m-1.

[mackenzie]

At the Palo Alto Poly dinner, many people eat family style. What this means is that you order what you want. When it arrives, you take as much of it as you want, then pass it around the table.

Many dishes don't make it all the way around the table, and that's okay. It just means that you see some shuffling as people move closer to those they believe will order dishes they enjoy toward the beginning of the meal.

[lorimt]

I frequently go to dinner with the MIT Science Fiction Society. The group size varies from 8ish to 15ish, but dinner gets ordered very smoothly. This basically works because we usually go to the same few places, at which there are a handful of standard dishes and a handful of other known good choices

[bennj]

First of all, you have a really good tapas place. I remember being very impressed by that duck dish we had in the berry sauce and whatever pomegranate sauce we got from the other table. Plus, putting hummus out with bread instead of butter? That's just a genius idea.

For reasons not clear to me, though you hit some of them squarely on the head in your analysis, we kind of had a confluence of bad decision making elements all right together there. Breadth of menu was the biggest one I think I left off the list. If you're ordering a pizza, you're quibbling over whether you want varieties of pork or vegetables on your pizza (this covers all standard Domino's toppings except for extra cheese, cheddar cheese, ground beef, and pineapples). That menu was so broad that you could have essentially a seafood experience all the way to an exotic meat experience.

I also want to add that I'm using a really naive model for satisficing here. The spirit is true, but I don't know if there are actually people who say "good enough" that quickly and

[lorimt]

I think the whole thing would have been, if not a piece of cake, way easier if there were only 5-6 people or if the dishes were 1/2 or 2/3 the price, so people could order 3 dishes on their own and trade things away/plan to share a dish with one other person at most.

[iluvsheep]

*I* think the main problem is our unclear definition of value

Curse you, now I want tapas!

[sithjawa]

I'm in favor of the 'nearest neighbors' (or 'who's with me?') style of ordering at places where dishes feed only a few people and the group is bigger. Either you and the people next to you decide on a dish to share (minimizing passing dishes across a 20-person table), or people take turns shouting "I want the Foo Platter. Who's with me?" until they have as many takers as the dish supports. If there are more takers than the dish supports, the other set orders their own