A policymaker selects a group of citizens—a minipublic—to advise her on the desirability of a policy. Each citizen can discover local evidence about the policy but might prefer not to due to political uncertainty in the policymaker’s adoption threshold. Such uncertainty is detrimental to...

We analyze a social learning model where the agents' utility depends not only on an unknown common component but also on an unknown idiosyncratic component. Each agent splits a learning budget between the two components. We characterize the optimal learning decisions and find necessary and...