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Academian comments on Let's split the cake, lengthwise, upwise and slantwise - Less Wrong
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In your Romantic Dinner / Battlestar Galactica example, it's not really clear what it means for one person to translate or scale their utility function. I'm going to take a newbie stab at it here, and please correct me if this is wrong:
Scaling: This is where the outcome matters more to one party than to the other party. For an extreme example, one person stands to gain between 0 and 10 minutes of extra life from the bargain, and the other person could gain between 0 and 500 years of extra life. And these are totally selfish people, who genuinely don't care about each other's utility; they just want to reach a bargain that optimizes their own utility. The total-utility-maximizing answer would favor the person who has the most to gain, and either person could turn this to their advantage by claiming to really, really care about the outcome. "I'll literally die if we don't watch Battlestar Galactica!", or some such thing.
Translation: This just adds or subtracts a constant amount of utility to any person's utility function. "I would love to watch BSG, but I'm so happy just being with you! ♥". If one person will be disgruntled if they don't (e.g.) have a romantic dinner, and the other person will be at least fairly cheerful either way, then this could influence the bargaining -- and if so, it gives a selfish person a way to game the system, by acting unhappy when they don't get their way.
The way to take advantage of people using the naive egalitarian or utility-sum-maximizing decision methods is to exaggerate how much you care about things, and sulk when you don't get your way. Also known as "acting like a toddler", which our society frowns on, probably for exactly this reason.
Is this reasonably accurate?
You got it: sharing decision utility is sharing power, not welfare..
A way to prevent people exaggerating how much they care about stuff is to mandate that, on average, people should care the same amount about everything. This is, very approximately, what I do with my close friends to make our mutual decisions quicker: so we don't accidentally make large sacrifices for small benefits to the other, we say on a scale from 1-5 how much we care about each decision, and the larger carer decides.
Example: "Where do you want to go for dinner? I only care 2." "I care 3 (because I have a bad stomach). Let me decide."
Over time, we've gotten faster, and just say the numbers unless an explanation is necessary. It's a nice system :) I'd hate to think my friend would make large sacrifices to benefit me only small gains, and conversely, so that's what we do.