Many-minds arguments claim that in some way or another, groups of decision-makers tend to make better decisions than individuals. This essay identifies five general and recurring problems with such arguments, as follows:(1) Whose minds? The group or population whose minds are at issue is often...

An axiom of institutional design is known as the ally principle: all else equal, voters, legislators or other principals will rationally delegate more authority to agents who share their preferences (“allies”). The ally principle is a conventional starting point for large literatures on...

Budget procedures are often adopted or changed to improve "transparency" in budgeting. This phrase can refer to two different, although related, stages of the budget process. First, transparency may refer to the outputs of budgeting; here the ideal is that the tradeoffs inherent in a budget...

In a standard analysis, the history of civil liberties is characterized by a series of security panics. A range of mechanisms - cognitive heuristics and biases, various forms of cascading and herding, conformity and preference falsification, and so on - cause periodic panics in which aroused...

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper...

This paper analyzes the impact of bureaucratic decision costs on agency expertise. The analysis shows that the effect of the cost associated with adopting a new regulation (the enactment cost) on agency expertise depends on what the agency would do if it remains uninformed. If an uninformed...

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper...

This article analyzes the effect of the cost that an agency must incur to adopt a new regulation (the enactment cost ) on the agency's incentive to invest in expertise. The effect of the enactment cost on agency expertise depends on whether the agency would regulate if it fails to acquire...