> Well I would say that I'd still want a proportional system the group of
> friends to stop one "faction" that had certain tastes dominating. For the
> meal example, if two of them always prefer curry and three prefer pizza, I
> don't think it would be satisfactory to go for pizza every time. So I
> wouldn't take a simple additive utility approach. I think PR makes sense,
> but arguably on the more majoritarian end of PR. But I'm not sure any of
> the methods we've discussed, including Thiele, work perfectly for this
> either.
--I think you don't really mean it.
If you wanted to maximize "A tastes B" type happiness purely, you'd
go pizza every time. The real issue here is you also care about a certain other
kind of happiness, which arises from the friends being friendly.
And the perception of repeatedly ignoring the tastes of the same two of them,
might undermine that psychology.
Something like that happened to me once. There were 5 people writing
a scientific
paper. I was one of them. I was the "interloper" in the sense that
there had been
a public lecture by 1 or 2 of them about the work of the 4. I came to
them the next day and explained that their results were weak and here
was how to get a lot better results. So then I was to become a
co-author. However, there then were numerous joint decisions to be
made about the paper. And a funny thing happened. Every time such a
decision was to be made, the vote was always 4 to 1 with me being the
1. This happened about 8 times
in a row. Now I did not think my views were at all unreasonable on
those. It seemed
to me the only explanation was that there was a conspiracy, since I did not
think such incredible unanimity of tastes could have arisen by pure
luck. Further, the 4
were writing the paper in secret, with me not being allowed to see
what they were writing until soon before some deadline. I did not
think this was a reasonable way to write a paper. But those 4,
unanimously, did. Then one of them told me the reason for this
was he felt that I was "not a team player."
So anyhow, that episode left me very unhappy and disgusted. I still to this
day do not comprehend what was going through their minds. Probably
there was some kind of abusive power relationship where one of them
controlled the other 3 somehow?
However, as a matter of repeated vote democracy, I guess this was "optimum."