A heurística da disponibilidade e a identificação do ciclo económico: uma análise baseada nos dados de confiança dos consumidores em Portugal

The Availability Heuristic, originally labeled by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, describes the behavioral phenomenon according to which individuals anticipate the frequency of an event based on how easily one can remember examples of that event. This study analyzes how this "availability effect" can help to identify and anticipate the economic cycle, using as a measure of this effect the difference in the responses of Portuguese consumers to the questions about the “evolution of the financial situation of the household" and the "evolution of the country's economic situation" in the monthly confidence surveys. The study concludes that the "availability effect" enhances the robustness of the contemporary correlation between confidence indicators and economic growth, in part because it mitigates the limitations arising from the so-called "reference effect" according to which the level of confidence of individuals is influenced, at any moment, by a "reference point", not always constant. The study also concludes that the "availability effect" presents a high lagged correlation with economic activity, and may contribute to reinforce the role of confidence indexes as leading indicators of the economic cycle. One possible argument for this result is that the "availability effect" simultaneously captures the volume of information about the economic cycle and the individuals' predictable response to that information.