James Surowiecki, in his book "The Wisdom of Crowds", addresses some of this. Of the three conditions he says are necessary for the crowd to be wise, he says the following which applies to the holiday meal planning:
"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its member to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms -- like market prices, or intelligent voting systems -- to aggregate and produce collective judgements..."
The use of crowd wisdom to select a holiday meal is doomed as soon as the author says "eventually you realize there's only way to please everyone." That's not the way you use crowd wisdom. The better way is to give them some # of tokens and let them spend the tokens on possible meals. The final selections won't please everyone, but more people will be happy at the party. If there's limited meal choices and everyone has veto power as per the article, the solution will quickly go to null with the number of voters.
"Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its member to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms -- like market prices, or intelligent voting systems -- to aggregate and produce collective judgements..."
The use of crowd wisdom to select a holiday meal is doomed as soon as the author says "eventually you realize there's only way to please everyone." That's not the way you use crowd wisdom. The better way is to give them some # of tokens and let them spend the tokens on possible meals. The final selections won't please everyone, but more people will be happy at the party. If there's limited meal choices and everyone has veto power as per the article, the solution will quickly go to null with the number of voters.