Pot luck dinners are dinners were everyone is expected to bring a dish of food for everyone to share. When everyone who attends does this, you end up with a wide variety of food and usually more than enough food for everyone there. Pot luck dinners also happen to be a great real-world example of the minimum threshold mechanism: you don’t get access to the rest of the food unless you bring a dish of your own. And there is a threshold; it just usually isn’t stated explicitly. If I brought exactly one chocolate chip cookie to a pot luck, you can be sure I’d get some dirty looks and I would not be invited again.
Pot luck dinners also illustrate another property of the minimum threshold mechanism: the food usually sucks. Each person puts forth the least amount of effort they can get away with. Often you end up with lots of store-bought potato salad or really easy-to-make homemade dishes. Why spend more effort on your pot luck dish if a cheap tub of potato salad from the grocery store is good enough?
However, not all the food borders on the inedible. Some people make great dishes, and those usually disappear moments after arriving. The “chef” who brought the dish usually derives some form of extra, personal benefit by bringing something great. Often they get known for good pot-luck dishes and get invited to lots of parties. When I was single I used to make really fancy pot-luck dishes as a way of catching the interest of the single women at the party; my favorite was individual cups of white chocolate mousse drizzled with a raspberry sauce. Now that I’m married, I don’t put near that much effort into pot-lucks. (For those keeping score at home, I don’t think my wife has ever had my white chocolate mousse. I had figured out that that didn’t work before I met her.)
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