“Antitrust law is at the center of all things property casualty insurance. All meetings start with what I call the antitrust invocation. Before anybody says anything, there's a lawyer from outside who says we are forbidden to talk about company operations and business practices. If anybody gets anywhere close to that line, we will stop the conversation immediately. Occasionally you will see a whole bunch of people stand up around a table and go, ah, no!”
Planet Money · Money & Markets · November 2026
Context
The host asked how antitrust law hangs over a lab funded jointly by rival insurers. Rochman describes the legal ritual that lets competitors share research without colluding.
Transcript
The whole house blew out the back door of the test chamber. It was literally in a pile, you know, like in a field in the pile.
…of legal tightrope. Because under U.S. antitrust law, which is meant to promote competition, competitors are strictly forbidden from coordinating on things like their pricing strategies or market segmentation because of the risk of collusion. How does the specter of antitrust law hang over this?
Antitrust law is at the center of all things property casualty insurance. And all meetings start with what I call the antitrust invocation, where, you know, before anybody says anything, there's a lawyer or somebody acting as the antitrust counsel from outside. They will specifically say at the start of every meeting, we are forbidden to talk about, you know, company operations and business practices. If anybody gets anywhere close to that line, we will stop the conversation immediately. And fortunately, I haven't seen a lot of people stopping those conversations over 40 years, but occasionally you will see a whole bunch of people stand up around a table and go, ah,
no, no, the floor is lava. Yes,
the floor is lava.
Now, it's true that the research IBHS does provides all these companies with a common body of knowledge they can use to tweak their business models, but each of them is also creating super secret formulas from their own specialized data sets to try to determine whether to offer coverage and how…
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