A small company that sells hand-made wooden furniture in the U.S. has imported some of its stock from the Philippines for the past 10 years. The fees for shipping the furniture from the Philippines to the U.S. is regularly double to triple the cost of the furniture itself. It has decided to look into the possibility of setting up its own small shipping company to improve shipping service in a way that directly reduces its own costs and makes extra revenue by providing shipping to other companies.
What information will the company would need to make this decision? Is a marketing research project still warranted if the company has some familiarity with the Philippines from its past years of business and is reluctant to invest tens of thousands of dollars into research? Discuss the nature of risk, the degree to which some risks can be quantified while others are subjective, and the individual differences in evaluating which risks are “worth it”