It is widely argued that individuals have biased perceptions of health and safety risks. A reconsideration of the best-known evidence suggests that this view is the erroneous result of a failure to consider the implications of scarce information. Our findings imply that the hypothesis that...

Using new survey data, we test the hypothesis that individuals' perceptions of health and safety risks are unbiased. While we find that respondents' estimates of those risks are sensitive to the information they are given to anchor their responses, we find no evidence to support the widely held...

A model of government budgeting is developed in which lobbying by interest group s can divert the allocation of funds away from the one preferred by t he median voter. The model is applied to state and local governments to show that the "flypaper effect"-the tendency for lump-sum grants to...

The authors develop a model in which optimizing policy makers in adjacent government jurisdictions levy excise taxes on a commodity that has a unique point of production from which all shipments emanate. From this model the authors derive an unusually specific predicted geographical pattern of...

The authors build a model of two-candidate elections in which voters judge candidates on the basis of how well their announced campaign positions correspond with their records. Given different records, the candidates will adopt different campaign positions. Two types of reputational advantage...