Too Many Proposals Pass the Benefit-Cost Test: Reply

We welcome John Quiggin's (1991) comment and the opportunity to reply. While we deny that Quiggin has done any damage to the argument of our article (Hoehn and Randall, 1989), his comment provides an opportunity for us to clarify and extend our argument in useful ways. We first address Quiggin's main points. He asserts that our first result is unrelated to the supporting verbal argument. He then argues that our second result is invalid as stated and can be rescued only by imposing unrealistic restrictions on the nature of the policy agenda. Thus, it is impossible to determine a priori whether too many proposals pass the benefit-cost test as the number of proposals becomes large. In short, Quiggin claims, our theorem 1 is not about what we said it was about, and theorem 2 is wrong.