Logically you might think we should accept a 5 per cent risk of our goods not arriving in exchange for a 15 per cent reduction in cost, but the lesson proved by these statistics is that we don’t: once the possibility moves beyond a certain threshold, we seem unable to take the risk at any price. If Amazon were to try to operate in a country where 10 per cent of all posted goods were stolen or went missing, virtually no discount would be high enough for them to sell anything at all.
