When it comes to cost-effectiveness, large pizzas trump small ones.
Quoctrung Bui at NPR's Planet Money blog was curious about which size pizza offered the greatest value after his coworker claimed the medium offered twice the pizza for only slightly more money.
Using data from more than 70,000 pizza chains, Bui makes a compelling case for ordering larger sizes.
"One 16-inch pizza has roughly the same area as 1.3 14-inch pizzas or 4 8-inch pizzas," Bui writes. "To get the same amount of pizza you get in a 16-inch pizza, you'd have to spend an extra $2.35 on 14-inch pizzas, or an extra $16.41 on 8-inch pizzas."
The reason behind the difference in value is because of the pizza's circular shape.
"The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius," Bui writes.
Check out the entire explanation, including some cool graphs and charts, over at NPR.