Decision making in groups

Have you ever stood together on the street without knowing where to eat?

That is a quite hard communication problem, as all participants need to communicate their preferences and commit to a decision. The problem often is that there is no leader in the group who manages this process and people often do not communicate their preferences or have none at all.

This often results from the lack of meaning in such decisions - I did not care enough to make a decision, so I waited for others to see if they care more, to make a decision about where to eat. In praxis the decision-driving factor is time (as everybody is quite hungry). We, therefore, have some kind of time-based consensus, which generally works quite well for people and is the core concept of the game “The Mind”.

Further explanation of this reminded me of applied Utilitarism, where you maximize the overall benefit by summarizing all gains and losses of a group to find the best decision. But unlike the Benthamsche Kalkül, it is not useful to ask everybody for the hypothetical value of all gains or losses and calculate such a decision. Just waiting is practically enough in most cases - whoever has a large gain or loss from a decision says so while people with a small preference remain silent as they don’t care that much about the decision. If no one cares, the importance of such small values will increase over time and someone will make a decision.