Abstract
We say that a collection e of subsets of X is bureaucratic if every maximal hierarchy on X contained in e is also maximum. We characterize bureaucratic set systems and show how they arise in phylogenetics. This framework has several useful algorithmic consequences: we generalize some earlier results and derive a polynomial-time algorithm for a parsimony problem arising in phylogenetic networks. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.