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Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation
Timur Kuran,Cass R. Sunstein +1 more
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Kuran and Sunstein this article analyze availability cascades and suggest reforms to alleviate their potential hazards, including new governmental structures designed to give civil servants better insulation against mass demands for regulatory change and an easily accessible scientific database to reduce people's dependence on popular (mis)perceptions.Abstract:
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception of 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 risks associated with production, consumption, and the environment, Professor 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 scientific database to reduce people's dependence on popular (mis)perceptions.read more
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References
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TL;DR: The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992) as discussed by the authors is a model of mass opinion formation that offers readers an introduction to the prevailing theory of opinion formation.
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Other people's money. The big problem in healthcare.
TL;DR: Only as a result of the Keynesian revolution did it become obvious to everyone that the problem during a slump is too little spending, not too much, and that recovery depends on persuading the public to start spending again.
The Normative Failure Theory of Law
TL;DR: Cooter et al. as mentioned in this paper analyzed the causes of normative failure and provided a diagnostic tool for legal intervention, and showed that normative failure plays the same role for law in general that the theory of market failure plays for the regulation of markets.
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