Investigating failure demand

Imagine you run a website. You look up the most popular pages and you discover that the ‘help’ page gets more traffic than any other. Do you congratulate yourself on writing such a magnificent help page? Or do you ask what’s wrong with your website that so many people need help?

That’s a classic example of ‘failure demand’, which is demand created by failure rather than success. It’s a theme in my book The Economics of Arrival, co-authored with Katherine Trebeck, and it’s investigated in a re...