[1] The availability cascade concept has been highly influential in finance theory and regulatory research, particular with respect to assessing and regulating risk.
Kuran and Sunstein emphasize the role of availability entrepreneurs, agents willing to invest resources into promoting a belief in order to derive some personal benefit.
Other key roles include journalists and politicians, both of which are subject to economic and reputational pressures, the former in competition in the media, the latter for political status.
[2] The availability heuristic, first identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is a mental shortcut that occurs when people judge the probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples.
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman cites the examples of celebrity divorces and airplane crashes; both are more often reported by the media, and thus tend to be exaggerated in perceived frequency.
Kuran and Sunstein offer three examples of availability cascades—Love Canal, the Alar scare, and TWA Flight 800—in which a spreading public panic led to growing calls for increasingly expensive government action to deal with risks that turned out later to be grossly exaggerated.
In the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, many believed that the disease received less attention than warranted, in part due to the stigma attached to its sufferers.
Since that time advocates— availability entrepreneurs that include LGBT activists and conservative Surgeon General of the United States C. Everett Koop—have succeeded in raising awareness to achieve significant funding.
It was triggered by the publication in 1998 of a paper in the medical journal The Lancet which presented apparent evidence that autism spectrum disorders could be caused by the MMR vaccine, an immunization against measles, mumps and rubella.
[5] In 2004, investigations by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer revealed that the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest,[6] had manipulated evidence,[7] and had broken other ethical codes.
The claims in Wakefield's 1998 The Lancet article were widely reported;[8] vaccination rates in the UK and Ireland dropped sharply,[9] which was followed by significantly increased incidence of measles and mumps, resulting in deaths and severe and permanent injuries.
[12] Concerns about immunization safety often follow a pattern: some investigators suggest that a medical condition is an adverse effect of vaccination; a premature announcement is made of the alleged adverse effect; the initial study is not reproduced by other groups; and finally, it takes several years to regain public confidence in the vaccine.
[14] The global warming controversy has attracted availability entrepreneurs on both sides, e.g. the book Merchants of Doubt claiming that scientific consensus had long ago been reached, and climatologist Patrick Michaels providing the denialist viewpoint.
The first took place in 1964, when an annoyed Long Island, New York housewife started giving out packages of inedible objects to children who she believed were too old to be trick-or-treating.
It claimed that "Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick or treating’ may bring them more horror than happiness", and provided specific examples of potential tampering.
Best has found five child deaths that were initially thought by local authorities to be caused by homicidal strangers, but none of those were sustained by investigation.
During this time, cases of poisoning were repeatedly reported based on unsubstantiated claims or before a full investigation could be completed and often never followed up on.
[1] In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention[23] and the Federal Bureau of Investigation[24] maintain web sites that provide objective statistics on the causes of death and violent crime.