With the pizza example surfacing again (and again and again...), it struck me that what bothers me about this example is that, in real life, deciding on a pizza is one of the few places where just about everybody would use informal consensus.
(For an introduction to formal consensus: http://www.consensus.net/) I've come over the years to the regretful conclusion that formal consensus is not workable for most organizations, at least not unless some fairly stringent preconditions are met (some are described by Butler at the site above; they include fairly explicit agreement on group goals, along with a lot of time an patience). But for pizza decisions, consensus rules. In particular, we try to accommodate singleton minorities with strong negative preferences ("concerns" in consensus-speak): anchovy-haters, the allergy-ridden. It doesn't matter that sausage and pepperoni is the Condorcet or majority winner if there's a vegetarian in the group; we'll find some consensus choice (fresh tomatoes and pesto, anyone?), given a little time, good will, and discussion. (That points up another problem with the pizza example: nobody ever seems to go to a pizza parlor with individual portions, or heterogeneous pizzas. But that's another problem.) I wonder if there isn't a better simple example out there in which voting is a better strategy than the alternatives. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
