The availability bias has an established seat at the corporate board’s table, too. Board members discuss what management has submitted—usually quarterly figures—instead of more important things, such as a clever move by the competition, a slump in employee motivation, or an unexpected change in customer behavior. They tend not to discuss what’s not on the agenda. In addition, people prefer information that is easy to obtain, be it economic data or recipes. They make decisions based on this information rather than on more relevant but harder-to-obtain information—often with disastrous results.
