I think there is a difference between how we try to compensate for the loss of something irreplaceable (a life) or disincentive negligence, and the price of something bought and sold.
1. The person committing the suicide and thus the fraud would not be weighing his life against the money, he would be considering the well-being of his beneficiaries instead, and deciding that their well-being is worth more than his life.
2. He cannot reasonably control the payout of the life insurance. Anything beyond a certain mark (maybe 2 million $) would raise a lot of eyebrows in the insurance company.
I wish I could read this without thinking of human sacrifice on a scale unseen since pre-Columbian meso-America.
Even by your logic this is insane. She's paid more than 2,000,000 a year, and therefore should not be sacrificing herself from a pure economics standpoint.
No, not really. An earnings call for an enterprise that large is worth many human lives (at the standard rate of about $2 million, which is itself derived from both people's own insurance choices as well as court-case awards); part of what someone at that level is paid to do is to put her company (and the well-being of the millions of people with a stake in it) above herself, and Mrs. Porat did that.