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The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging

95 points · 128 comments · paimapi

  1. sib · · focus · HN ↗
    "Did you know that home insurers use aerial drones to study your rooftop? If the conditions signal neglect, they might cancel your coverage before an accident."

    While there are certainly some issues of concern in the article and the reviewed book, the above seems like exactly what insurance companies should be doing: pricing (or making available) coverage based upon risk.

    This is not much different from an auto insurance company raising your rates (or cancelling coverage) because you've received a number of speeding tickets, which implies increased future risk of loss.

    In fact, I received a letter from my homeowners insurance company a couple years ago stating that they would not renew our coverage due to conditions that they'd observed (clearly from aerial imagery) including overgrown bushes touching the walls of the house and some larger tree branches growing over the house.

    I had a landscaping company come and fix the issues, sent my own drone up to take new pictures, sent the company the pictures, and they agreed to continue coverage. And now my house has less future risk of damage. This seems like a win-win for both of us.

    1. m463 · · focus · HN ↗
      You should try driving a tesla with tesla insurance.

      Each drive you make will rate you based on hard braking, aggressive turning, unsafe following, excessive speeding, late night driving, forced autosteer/fsd disengagements, unbuckled driving.

      You'd think that driving well would eliminate these, but no.

      But they give you a pass if you use tesla fsd. That is their endgame, but it sometimes gets a pass for driving more dangerously than you do. You speed - ding. fsd speeds 3x what you do? 100% score.

      lol. do you know the world this is creating? who is making the rules?

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