Suppose that the costs of obtaining and using political information fall dramatically, in large part because of new technologies such as the Internet. What effects might this have on political accountability and social welfare? This response to a paper by Jane Schacter offers some skeptical...

In the administrative state, how should expert opinions be aggregated and used? If a panel of experts is unanimous on a question of fact, causation, or prediction, can an administrative agency rationally disagree, and on what grounds? If experts are split into a majority view and a minority...

Chevron, U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council lays out a two-step process that courts must follow when they review a federal agency's construction of a federal statute. We argue that Chevron, rightly understood, has only one step. The single question is whether the agency's construction...

What is collective wisdom, and how can institutions be designed to generate and exploit it? This essay argues for a reductionist conception of collective wisdom as collective epistemic accuracy, and cashes out that conception at the level of institutional design. Assuming that the social goal is...

Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were...