Maybe OP is suggesting there’s a lot of fraudulent claims in auto insurance, or poor driving/maintenance practices that lead to more claims.

When your insurance company has a lot of customers, you don’t care about your big claim’s contribution to rate increases because it will be pennies/month. (Yes, I understand your rates can go up if you’re at fault, but you can also stop driving, drive without insurance (in some places) or reduce your policy).

While this ship has thousands of containers, they probably run through a handful of shipping agents that won’t be in business for long if they make fraudulent claims.

I don't know how insurances work outside of Germany but processing insurance claims is the only thing where insurances can lose money so they will reward you for good driving/maintenance practices with lower fees. If you run a insurance company your goal is basically to become redundant. The best case scenario is to collect a monthly fee but never pay out any insurance claims. Fraudulent claims are pure losses so there is already a strong business incentive to avoid those.

The bigger the risk that needs to be insured, the bigger the market for the insurers, and profits scale with the size of the market. Insurers are incentivised to minimise claims on their own policies, yes, but as a group they are perfectly happy with rules which increase the overall size and amount of claims, provided it affects everyone equally.

I guess your tow truck drivers are more respectable than ours that cloned police’s pricey “encrypted” radios to get to accidents faster, charged insurecos hundreds for the tow, would add damage to cars and bring them to sketchy repair shops:

https://nationalpost.com/news/toronto-cop-part-of-organized-...

For some reason, health care expenses related to motor vehicle accidents are paid by the at-fault’s insurer instead of the public health system, so there’s lots of fraud there too. And more product for insurers to sell.

Since the at-fault insurer pays, there’s a lot of incentive for fraud for the “victim”. Some call it the auto-lotto.

Because we created lots of arbitrary fault-determination rules so insurers can’t fight eachother to assign fault, it’s not difficult to stage an accident where someone else is at-fault.

> I guess your tow truck drivers are more respectable than ours that cloned police’s pricey “encrypted” radios to get to accidents faster, charged insurecos hundreds for the tow, would add damage to cars and bring them to sketchy repair shops:

In my country the insurance company has a list of approved garages and sets the price. Nobody is going to pay a tow truck for preemtively moving a car, they might arrest them for taking without consent.

If a car really needs a tow for safety purposes, the police will organise that based on their pre-existing contracts and paid for a known price (by the insurance company, or the car owner)

If the car is abandoned the council will eventually shift it and claim the cost back as littering

If the car is safe though it's upto the owner to contact their insurance company and arrange for them to come out and shift it.

Multiple companies racing to the scene sounds like something from the 1800s with fire brigades sabotaging each other.

> While this ship has thousands of containers, they probably run through a handful of shipping agents that won’t be in business for long if they make fraudulent claims.

I don't think they can even make fraudulent claims.

Whether a container gets thrown over board or not is a binary outcome.

How much value to declare upfront is self-policing:

If you declare a high value and someone else's containers gets thrown overboard, your share of the averaged losses is bigger.