On Friday, one of my roommates had a bunch of his friends over, and they were trying to decide on a movie to watch. There were 7 or 8 total people, and I'm sure everyone knows how difficult it is to choose a movie with 2 or 3 people, let alone 7 or 8. One person had the remote, and as he scrolled through options, it became clear to me that the situation was an example of Mueller's discussion on simple majority voting systems.
The indifference maps in this situation would be all sorts of convoluted, especially considering the fact that these folks were not exactly acting in the most rational sense (it was a Friday night). However, Mueller's point was still illustrated. Every time a new option of a movie came up, some people preferred it, and some people did not. There wasn't a single movie that had unanimity, and each time the option changed, it seemed to be a Pareto inefficient move because someone was made worse off. No movie was chosen by the group, and this illustrates the point that a widely accepted decision or even a pareto efficient outcome is difficult with simple majority collective action. Maybe its easier if we let something like this decide for us. But I don't think that would be pareto efficient either.
2 comments:
Ritvik- I enjoyed this post because it's a everyday application of the problem with simply majority voting. With all things, but movies in particular, people's preferences are heterogenous- one might prefer action to a documentary, another a documentary to horror, another horror to action. There is no genre, let alone specific movie, that is preferred. Perhaps restricting the choices of genres could subsequently make the decision easier, but preferences within the genre will most likely still not yield a pareto efficient outcome. Also, it's really funny that the outcome of this situation with your roommate and his buddies was that no movie was chosen. We all know that feeling where it looks like our preferred movie is going to be chosen, but then the group changes to consider another movie, and we feel worse off.
So, I actually lied a little to make the example simpler (taking a page from Mr. Coppock's book perhaps). A movie was chosen with dictatorial force by my roommate. I needed a hyperlink in the post so I inserted the movie picker site, but I guess my roommate acted as that kind of dictator, and maybe his choice would not have occurred by a simple majority democratic choice. This might have been the case since no one really payed attention to the movie. I don't know why I didn't just include this in my original post since it seems like a pretty simple addition, but here it is.
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