The head of an organization is viewed as dealing with an optimization problem under a variety of constraints. The bureaucracy, by contrast, is viewed as dealing with the constraints alone: it has to make a multitude of low-level decisions, in such a way that no constraint is violated. However, even the feasibility problem is computationally hard. Hence bureaucracies often try to rely on past cases, in the hope of making decisions that are feasible. We study the way that past cases might affect current choices, and show that, under certain conditions, the bureaucracy will guarantee feasibility only if it mimics its behavior in a single past case.
