The Tyranny of Small Decisions
When a group of people needs to decide on an action to be taken, and every participant only gets to decide on very small steps, so that these small decisions work together to create the total outcome, it is often seen that the outcome will be different from what the participants had chosen if they had a direct say in the issue.
This effect is very apparent in the free market. If everyone would stop buying goods from corporations which behave badly, corporations would slowly compete to be nicer and nicer. Leaving aside the problem of deciding which corporations are bad and which are nice, it can be seen that other criteria often affect the decision where to buy much more than this, even though most people would condemn bad actions by corporations if they would be asked.
This is called the Tyranny of Small Decision, apparently invented by an economist named Alfred E. Kahn. If anyone knows the source of this, please let me know.
