Works
- Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation, Stanford Law Review, 1999
- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, 2008
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Choice architecture and defaults. Choice architecture is the way options are presented, and it always influences choice, so there is no neutral design. A nudge is any feature of that design which predictably shifts behavior without forbidding options or materially changing incentives; defaults are the strongest example, because whatever happens when people do nothing is what most people end up with.
Availability cascades. An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process in which a belief gains plausibility the more it is repeated in public discussion. People partly learn from what others appear to believe and partly adjust what they say to keep social acceptance, and availability entrepreneurs deliberately feed the process.
What it explains
Sunstein explains how defaults decide outcomes when people do not choose, and how a story repeated often enough becomes what everyone believes. Inside organizations, whoever sets the default and whoever controls which stories circulate shapes decisions without a formal argument.