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.
Big groups (over ~8) get split up by table (resulting in 5+person groups), someone proposes a number of dishes to order (which allows people to opt out easily), and then the standards are put down on paper by someone, and a couple of alternates/duplicates are proposed.
I tried a variant of this at the tapas place, but we started out unable to agree on a number of dishes, then moved on to disagreeing about basic types of protein preferred when people started naming dishes (not to mention how many). This isn't a criticism of the people ordering, but of the system, for lack of a better term. Since there were so many dishes, and many unusual ones (and hearing was tricky), it was hard to guess who would like what, how popular something would be, etc. We pretty much had to split up, since tapas take a little negotiating to figure out what people want.
I think the general question of satisficing vs maximizing is a good one, but am not sure how well it works here. I'm mostly a maximizer, but my main issue was that the list of "animals I eat" only covered part of the menu, and unfortunately didn't match well with my initial seat-mates.
It's definitely an interesting question, though. I'm not sure what I think the answer should be for satisficers. For maximizers, it seems pretty straightforward that n going up is bad (more decisions to optimize over). As for k, there are more slots available to fit in someone's favorite dish, but more combinations to compare to one another, if you really want to find the best overall choice.
no subject
Big groups (over ~8) get split up by table (resulting in 5+person groups), someone proposes a number of dishes to order (which allows people to opt out easily), and then the standards are put down on paper by someone, and a couple of alternates/duplicates are proposed.
I tried a variant of this at the tapas place, but we started out unable to agree on a number of dishes, then moved on to disagreeing about basic types of protein preferred when people started naming dishes (not to mention how many). This isn't a criticism of the people ordering, but of the system, for lack of a better term. Since there were so many dishes, and many unusual ones (and hearing was tricky), it was hard to guess who would like what, how popular something would be, etc. We pretty much had to split up, since tapas take a little negotiating to figure out what people want.
I think the general question of satisficing vs maximizing is a good one, but am not sure how well it works here. I'm mostly a maximizer, but my main issue was that the list of "animals I eat" only covered part of the menu, and unfortunately didn't match well with my initial seat-mates.
It's definitely an interesting question, though. I'm not sure what I think the answer should be for satisficers. For maximizers, it seems pretty straightforward that n going up is bad (more decisions to optimize over). As for k, there are more slots available to fit in someone's favorite dish, but more combinations to compare to one another, if you really want to find the best overall choice.