Acknowledgments

This short book has been very long in coming. We decided to write it in 2007, after several collaborative endeavors involving deliberation by citizens and jurors. In 2009, however, Sunstein joined the Obama administration, and the project was put on hold until 2012, when we began again. As the text suggests, the book has been informed by Sunstein’s experience and by a sense of what goes well, and what goes a bit less well, in government.

We are grateful to our superb editor, Jeff Kehoe, both for his patience and for providing excellent guidance, especially at crucial moments. Three anonymous reviewers provided terrific comments and general inspiration. Sunstein gives particular thanks to his wife, Samantha Power, for many discussions of these questions, and Hastie thanks Nancy Pennington for always having the best ideas. Daniel Kanter provided superb research assistance and excellent comments.

Both of us have done a great deal of work on this topic, and this book draws heavily from some of that work, above all, Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie, “Garbage In, Garbage Out? Some Micro Sources of Macro Errors,” Journal of Institutional Economics (2014), and Cass R. Sunstein, “Group Judgments,” New York University Law Review 80 (2005): 962–1049. Much of the latter article appears in Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). We are grateful to the editors of the Journal of Institutional Economics and the New York University Law Review for permission to draw from that material here. We have also drawn on Daniel Gigone and Reid Hastie, “Proper Analysis of the Accuracy of Group Judgment,” Psychological Bulletin 121 (1997): 149, 161–162; and Reid Hastie, “Review Essay: Experimental Evidence on Group Accuracy,” in Information Pooling and Group Decision Making, ed. Bernard Grofman and Guillermo Owen (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1986), 129–158. Readers who are interested in more technical presentations might consult that work.