Organizations such as the Food and Drug Agency can make both type I (approving bad drugs) and type II errors (rejecting good ones). Optimal reliability entails balancing these two kinds of mistakes just so. This paper addresses the question of whether and when an imperfectly rational agency - in...

Since the seminal work of Key (1966), Kramer (1971), and Nordhaus (1975), retrospective voting has been a major component of voting theory. However, although these views are alive empirically (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000; Franzese, 2002; Hibbs, 2006), most theorizing assumes rational citizens. We...