Tversky & Kahneman 1973 (Cognitive Psychology) — availability heuristic; why "once burned" is NOT just recency bias

Claim: Tversky and Kahneman's 1973 paper "Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability" established the availability heuristic — and thereby what is usually called recency bias: a general overweighting of recently-encountered information when estimating frequency or probability.

Source: Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Cognitive Psychology 5(2): 207–232.

Confidence: Verified.

For Candid — the "once burned" pattern is more specific than recency: A GC who has been burned does not simply remember the last vendor more vividly. He performs a structural reweighting of the probability estimate of vendor failure across the entire category, combined with a shift in the decision rule from expected-value to maximin (avoid worst case). Three distinct mechanisms beyond availability:

1. Disposition effect / narrow framing over realized losses — [[shefrin-statman-1985-disposition-effect-narrow-framing]]
2. Asymmetric trust updating after competence vs integrity violations — [[kim-ferrin-cooper-dirks-2004-competence-vs-integrity-trust-repair]]
3. Negativity dominance over arithmetic averaging — [[rozin-royzman-2001-negativity-dominance]]

Treating once-burned as "just recency bias" leads to the wrong intervention. Recency would predict the effect fades with time; the underlying mechanisms do not predict that.