Deliberation may increase the quality of decisions but also necessarily takes time and effort and hence will have costs. But proponents of deliberative democracy as an attractive or superior method for making decisions almost all focus on presumed benefits while in practice ignoring the costs associated with investing time and resources in the process of deliberation. We show that the cost side significantly influences the performance of the deliberative process. Through a number of simulations, we demonstrate that there must be a certain point beyond which the costs of deliberating will outweigh the potential benefits. Since this type of processes invariably will be time consuming, especially when the convergence of the participants towards a common goal is slow, conditions are derived where the deliberative process performs relatively well or relatively poorly, both as concerns the probability of reaching an agreement and in the net benefits to the participants. This is especially the case when the number of participants increase.

审议可以提高决策的质量，但也需要花费时间和精力，因此会产生成本。但是，议事民主的拥护者认为，决策民主是一种有吸引力的或优越的决策方法，几乎​​都集中在假定的利益上，而实际上却忽略了在审议过程中投入时间和资源所带来的成本。我们表明，成本方面显着影响了审议过程的绩效。通过大量的模拟，我们证明必须有一个特定的点，超过这个点，审议的成本将超过潜在的收益。由于此类过程总是很耗时，尤其是在参与者朝着共同目标的收敛缓慢时，在达成协商一致的可能性和参与者的净收益方面，都得出了协商过程表现相对较好或相对较差的条件。参加人数增加时尤其如此。