FT on AI in insurance: “Groups are building detailed customer profiles to inform pricing and try to influence behaviour…Take your medicine when the app tells you, do your exercise and eat well. As long as you “show good compliance” and share the data, you will reduce your health risks — and your insurance premium…AI, which sifts data and aims to learn like humans, is allowing insurers to produce highly individualised profiles of customer risk that evolve in real time. In parts of the market, it is being used to refine or replace the traditional model of an annual premium, creating contracts that are informed by factors including customer behaviour.”
Marc Andreessen on venture investing: “At our firm we have over 250 companies currently in our portfolio that we own 10% or more of. Think about it as 250 X-wing fighters. They are running sorties against the death star. By the way, we know statistically what’s going to happen from the data. Half of them are going to get blown up on impact. In top venture capital half the companies don’t work, so we’re going to lose half of them for a variety of reasons. Some of them screw things up, but some of them hit reflector shields and get blown up. And then another quarter of them are going to generate okay but not great returns, which is to say they’re going to do something interesting or useful but not revolutionary. So it’s really only the top quartile of the companies we fund that is going to be revolutionary and meaningful. So out of the 250 call that, whatever the number is… 70, 60? The dangers of doing math on the fly. Within that quartile, there’s an upward 10% who are really going to punch through that have the potential to change things.”
Why the govt shouldn’t decide what you pay for an air ticket: by Pranay Kotasthane: “What began as a Covid-19 emergency measure to discourage travel has taken the shape of a hydra-headed policy aiming to solve many problems at the same time. An unintended consequence of government intervention that public policy analysts watch out for is rent-seeking. Rent-seekers often distort government policies to serve their interests. And that’s what seems to be the real reason behind these three-fold restrictions. The capacity restrictions and price floors appear to be a clientelist policy to clip the wings of the larger players in the market and give breathing space to the financially weaker airlines.”
