Details of the performance of the BYM model in estimating the relative risk of the high-risk areas are presented in Table 1, with findings for L1-BYM and MIX shown in Tables 2 and 3, respectively. Overall, for the BYM model, a great deal of smoothing of the relative risks is apparent. For the isolated areas in Simu 1, one can see that relative risks of 1.5 in any single area are smoothed away, even in the most favorable case of an area with expected counts of 70 (90% area SF = 10). When the simulated relative risk is 2, the posterior mean risk estimate is above 1.2 only when the expected count is around 50 or more (e.g., 75% area with SF = 10). Relative risks of 3 are smoothed to about half their values when the expected counts are around 10 (e.g., 25% area with SF = 10 or 75% area with SF = 2). Comparison of Simu 2 with Simu 1 (75% area) shows that having a cluster of high-risk areas rather than a single area with elevated risk slightly decreases the amount of smoothing for the same average expected count. Again, this is apparent in the many-cluster situation of Simu 3, where even though the true θ*i are smaller, the relative risk estimates are higher than those for Simu 2.