buffet economics

it would be cool, had i the requisite brain and expertise, to write a paper on the economics of all-you-can-eat buffets. how does one maximize utility?

a few incoherent ideas:

  1. straightforwardly, people would unselectively eat as much as they could in order to maximize the value of their money. equal, plentiful amounts of every dish on offer. increase in quantity eaten translates directly to decrease in cost of each unit eaten.
  2. arguably, though, you could eat as much of your favourite dishes in that buffet as you possibly could, in order to maximize your utility even further. so, someone who likes fried chicken far more than fried vegetables would enjoy greater utility by eating more fried chicken than fried vegetables, rather than equal amounts of both.
  3. however, marginal returns diminishes. after the fifteenth piece of fried chicken, having a bite of vegetables would probably increase one's utility more than the sixteenth piece of fried chicken.
  4. in addition, one could subscribe to external regulators of value. these are the people who will go into an all-you-can-eat buffet and eat high carb dishes like pasta, rice etc, because these are cheaper, fill you up faster, and are therefore less valuable in terms of ratio of stomach space to dollar spent.
  5. relatedly, there are those who maximize their utility by heaping their plate with shellfish, caviar, oysters, pate, peking duck, and all things expensive and rare. rationally this is to do with maximizing unit value of return on each dollar spent. A $5 buffet spent eating pasta is "less valuable" than a $5 buffet spent eating peking duck.
  6. conflict arises, however, when one actually prefers pasta to peking duck. which would increase one's utility more?
  7. also, do any one of these methods of increasing utility increase utility more than the others? even if one prefers pasta to peking duck, i.e. eating pasta would increase one's utility more than eating duck, could one's utility actually be increased more by eating peking duck simply because one knows that duck is more expensive than pasta?
  8. how do desserts fit into all this??

if anyone economically-inclined ever writes a paper on this, please do let me know. heck, if researching this paper allows me to peruse all-you-can-eat buffets all over the world, i'll write the damned thing myself.