Deciding Where to Eat

When it comes to making group decisions, my friends and I are the worst, especially when deciding where to eat. I kid-you-not when I say that my friends and I have argued for over TWO hours trying to decide what pizza restaurant to order food from. These group decisions are costly in time and effort because everyone has different preferences and dietary restrictions; however, these decisions are made as a group because there is a higher cost imposed on the individual when deciding where to eat on his own because the individual forgoes the community aspect of eating together. The decision-making costs of this scenario between my friends and I are extremely high because we struggle immensely to get people to come to an agreement on where to eat, and the external costs are high to each individual because many of us are stubborn and hold strong food preferences that drive up the cost of each individual not agreeing with the decision made by the group. Usually, we decide on where to eat by a majority rules basis, but according to Buchanan and Tullock, my friends and I suffer from an insufficient allocation of resources because we don’t operate at the cost minimizing threshold.