Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation

Abstract

An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressedperception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepreneurs-activists who manipulate the content of public discourse-strive to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas. Their availability campaigns may yield social benefits, but sometimes they bring harm, which suggests a need for safeguards. Focusing on the role of mass pressures in the regulation of risk associated with production, consumption, and the environment, Professors Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein analyze availability cascades and suggest reforms to alleviate their potential hazards. Their proposals include new governmental structures designed to give civil servants better insulation against mass demands for regulatory change and an easily accessible scientzfic database to reduce people S dependence on popular (mis)perceptions.

Judicial Review as a Response to Political Posturing

“…36 than other actors from arguments about why judges are systematically less rational than other actors. As for the specific argument that judges attach undue salience to the cases before them, it is not clear how strong the effect actually is relative to potentially countervailing considerations, such as the additional information contained in a particular case or series of cases (Rogers 2001;Sherwin 2006), and the analogous tendency of elected officials to overreact to salient events (Kuran and Sunstein 1999). 36 Our characterization of the conditions under which passive and active equilibria exist is incomplete, because the closed-form solution for the low-ability Leader's equilibrium strategy in nonstrict equilibria tends to be analytically intractable.…”

Thinking About Global Warming

“…One such bias results from fluctuations in public attention to long-term risk (Kuran and Sunstein, 1999). People become concerned about risks in part through a process of social contagion.…”

Systematically Biased Beliefs about Political Influence: Evidence from the Perceptions of Political Influence on Policy Outcomes Survey

“…But perhaps more importantly, our findings highlight the need for political models with realistic assumptions about human cognition (e.g., Kuran and Sunstein 1999). If presidents know that voters will at least partially blame Congress for their errors, how does this change presidential behavior?…”