Availability Cascade

An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process in which a claim or idea, often one that seems to explain something complex in a simple and appealing way, becomes progressively more credible and more widely believed the more it is repeated in public discourse, independent of its actual truth. The legal scholars Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein introduced the term, describing it as a combination of the availability heuristic, in which people judge the likelihood of something by how easily examples come to mind, with an information cascade in which people adopt a belief because they observe others adopting it. Because participants in the cascade have an incentive to appear to hold the same views as others around them, an availability cascade can drive public perception of risk or of a policy issue out of proportion to the underlying evidence, a dynamic the concept has been applied to in analyses of finance and regulatory risk debates.