Timur Kuran is a Turkish American economist, Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor in Islamic Studies at Duke University.

In 2017, Timur Kuran and legal scholar Cass Sunstein advanced an incredibly powerful construct called an availability cascade. Availability cascades combine informational cascades and reputational cascades, and are mediated by the availability heuristic (all will be explained in the podcast).

Joe and Timur talk about the application of availability cascades to housing bubbles, and the ‘availability entrepreneurs’ who populate housing bubbles.

Show notes

Selected links

• Follow Timur: Website | Twitter
• ‘On the Likely Extent of Falls in Irish House Prices’, paper by Morgan Kelly
• ‘A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades’, paper by Sushil Bikhchandani et al
• ‘How a Bubble Stayed Under the Radar’, The New York Times article by Robert Shiller
• Irrational Exuberance, by Robert Shiller
• ‘Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation’, paper by Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein
• ‘Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability’, paper by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
• ‘A History of Housing Prices in Australia 1880-2010’, paper by Nigel Stapledon

Topics discussed

• How do availability cascades apply to economic bubbles? [11:59]
• The availability entrepreneurs of the property market. [19:44]
• Availability cascades versus the efficient markets hypothesis. [33:47]