We consider a political agency model where voters learn information about some policy-relevant variable, which they can ignore when it impedes their desire to hold optimistic beliefs. Voters' excessive tendency to sustain optimism may result in inefficient political decision-making because...

We consider a market where privately informed sellers resort to certification to overcome adverse selection. There is uncertainty about the certifier's ability to generate accurate information. The profit of a monopolistic certifier is an inverted U-shaped function of his reputation for...