Correspondence on Shared Order Negotiation
Any shared order negotiation performed twice may not be removed merely because the original problem has disappeared.
COUNTERFACTUAL: Correspondence on Shared Order Negotiation
What would have happened if each person had ordered separately.
What Actually Happened
A group spends longer deciding one shared delivery order than it would take each person to choose separately. The order required a single restaurant. The restaurant required consensus. The consensus required a thread. The thread required someone to summarize the thread. The summary produced two new preferences that had not been expressed during the thread. The two new preferences were incompatible with the restaurant. A new restaurant was proposed. Nobody objected immediately.
What Would Have Happened
Four separate orders. Four decisions made independently and without reference to one another. Total deliberation time: under three minutes across all parties, running concurrently.
Why This Did Not Happen
A temporary workaround for shared order negotiation becomes the default because it worked once. On the occasion it worked, the meal was good and everyone ate something they wanted. No control condition was run. The group did not test whether each person ordering separately would have produced an equally good meal. The shared order received credit for the outcome.
What the Second Person Did
A second person joined the thread and the negotiation without being asked. They were not part of the original order. Joining the thread was understood to mean joining the order. Other people begin planning around the workaround and quietly preserving it. The second person's preferences are now part of the negotiation. The negotiation is larger.
What Happened to the Person Who Said They Would Eat Anything
They were assigned the item nobody else wanted. This happens every time. The service is supposed to remove meal work, but choosing and tracking it becomes its own task, and the task distributes more evenly when preferences are stated than when they are withheld.
Absurd Rule in Force
Private anxiety becomes procedure when more than one person starts coordinating around it. A person using the ordinary method now has to explain why they ignored the established procedure. The ordinary method, here, is ordering independently. Ordering independently requires stating that you are ordering independently, which requires explaining why the group order is being declined, which takes longer than joining the group order.
Counterfactual Finding
The separate-order outcome would have been faster, would have produced food each person wanted, and would have required no thread. It is not used because using it requires opting out, and opting out is a social act, and the social act costs more than the negotiation.