Favourite Player's Injured? Get a Refund (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Any sports fan will know, or at least appreciate, the disappointment of going to watch your team only to find that a top player has been left out. But what if you could pay an extra bit of money for your ticket -- say, 5-15% on top of the normal price -- and insure the cost of your ticket against such a situation? If your favourite player does not play, for whatever reason, you get your money back. That's the intriguing premise behind Fansure, a start-up currently based in Belmont, California. When I spoke to the firm's marketing manager, Tara Fan, she explained it in the context of a basketball game: "Some tickets are $300-$400 to go to a game. Typically, you're paying that to see someone like LeBron James, or Kevin Durant, or someone like that." It works like this: You buy the ticket as normal. Then, at least 48 hours before the game, you go to Fansure, and you pay them an added percentage. The amount reflects what Fansure thinks is the likelihood of your selected player appearing or not.

Someone like Durant for instance, rarely misses a game for the Golden State Warriors and so the premium would be relatively low. "It would only be, I would say, 8% of your ticket price," Ms Fan explained. "It's like... $30 to cover a $400 ticket. And so that's where the benefit rolls out." If Durant plays, you've wasted your $30, which Fansure pockets. If he doesn't, you still get to go and enjoy the game, and Fansure will refund you the entire amount of the ticket (but keeps the bit you paid for insurance).

Comments

Gambling

[Bugler412]

So now we're developing a way to gamble using your event tickets? Like we needed another way to gamble?

Re:Gambling

[LordKronos]

Pretty much every form of insurance is not gambling. The idea with gambling is that if things go the way you planned, you come out a winner. But generally with insurance, you don't come away feeling like a winner.

Car insurance: You get into a car accident, and your car insurance pays for replairs. But generally you are still at a loss. You've lost significant time dealing with it. Repaired cars with any significant damage are often not quite the same. When you go to sell the car you are likely to get less for it (and insurance rarely compensates you, fully or even at all, for diminished value. And there's a good chance you'll end up paying more in insurance in the future

House insurance: Your house burns down, and it's a gigantic life disruption. Depending on how extensive the damage and other circumstances, you could be spending more than a year living out of a hotel or rental. Your insurance will pay for a lot of your stuff, but realistically there will be so many things not covered and that you don't even remember to claim. Anything of sentimental value is impossible to replace. It's pretty much impossible to be made whole. In lesser cases, like where you just have a water leak, insurers are fearful of mold so you could end up getting dropped and find your house nearly uninsurable except for the most expensive policies. It can even affect you went you go do sell and the buyer finds nobody wants to insure the house.

Life insurance: If you have a very high value policy, then even with all your expenses incurred it may be possible to come out financially better off...but come on, someone you love has died, which can just destroy your life (especially if kids are invovled...for their entire life they'll never be quite the same). But realistically, in many cases you don't even come out financially positive in the long run when the big money earner is gone from the picture and year after year you chip away at the insurance payout

Medical insurance: Considering the cost of premiums, the only way for medical insurance to not be a negative value investment is to have a lot of medical bills, which generally means someone is pretty sick.

Sports player insurance: I still get to go to the game and still get to enjoy it, but maybe get 90% of my cost of the ticket refunded. And note that unlike other insurances, here I was already happy to pay 100% of the value to do that. So this is really like a positive value return when the insurance kicks in (as opposed to all the above examples, where you pretty much always lose out)

Re:Gambling

[caseih]

Wait, what? Is all insurance gambling? If I buy trip cancellation insurance from American Auto Association, I'm gambling? Or any other form of external, third-party insurance? I don't think so.

This is not gambling. This is insurance. The only gambling going on is that the company is gambling that most players will not be injured most of the time, so their premiums will cover the occasional payout. If there is an injury, then all the participants in the pool get a pay out. It's not like only one person gets the pot, which is what gambling is.

Re:Gambling

[squiggleslash]

Name one kind of manslaughter that isn't like murder.

The difference between gambling and insurance is motive and intent. Gambling is about trying to make it rich. Insurance is about preventing an unforeseen event causing undue hardship. They're not the same thing even if they use similar mechanisms to achieve their set goals.

Awesome!

[Type44Q]

After all these years, a solution... to the world's smallest fucking problem.p Thanks for brightening my morning, Msmash! ;)

Now I just need to find...

[Lab Rat Jason]

the player MOST likely to be injured on the team, regardless of who I actually want to watch play.

--Don't hate the player, hate the game!

Re:Now I just need to find...

[cellocgw]

Unless you plan to injure the player yourself, of course.

Tonya Harding, is that you?

Not gambling

[registrations_suck]

This is not gambling, it's just insurance. As a buyer of this "product", there is no way for me to ever come out "ahead".

I buy a ticket for $100. Then I buy insurance for another $10. So I'm in for $110.

Now suppose "my player" is not going to be in the game, so Fansure goes ahead and gives me back the $100 for the ticket, but they keep the $10 premium. So now I've LOST $10.

For it to be "gambling", there has to be some path to come out AHEAD. They'd have to pay the $100 for the ticket, PLUS the $10 premium, PLUS some amount that puts me ahead.

Sure, it is a gamble for FANSURE, as all insurance is. Nothing novel there. But there's just no way this can be considered gambling on the part of the consumer.

Re:Insurance

[BringsApples]

Gambling = betting on yourself to win and get extra money
Insurance = betting on yourself to lose, and not have to pay extra money.

Re: That's not how apostrophes work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thatâ(TM)s not and apostrophe, thisâ(TM) an apostrophe and itâ(TM)s how theyâ(TM)re supposed to work on slashdot

Scale of things

[DrYak]

The idea with gambling is that you are betting on a thing happening or not happening. And insurance absolutely falls into that.

Note I fully support insurance, but it absolutely has all the markings of gambling.

In theory, the idea behind insurance is socialized cost : spreading the cost of accidents across a wider population.

(Medical insurance: Instead of having a poor random guy victim of a sudden unplanned medical expense they can't afford and having big health and economic repercussion because of that, everyone pays a bit and if the sudden medical untuck lands on you, you don't have to pay extra).

Of course, in practice there's an overlap with gambling somewhere in the middle.

But I have the impression that lots of insurance companies have moved away from the socialized costs and evolved more into gambling, specially trying to maximize *their own* chances of winning.

Re:Scale of things

[hazardPPP]

However, that is strictly an internal detail of the insurance business and not a factor in the definition of insurance. It's still insurance even if we're just talking about a contract between two parties with no risk pool.

No, it is not an "internal detail". It is fundamental. Without that, insurance at scale does not work. I don't know what you're using as the "definition" of insurance but what matters is what insurance is in practice, not how it is defined in a dictionary or textbook.

Insurance companies would not be in business if they sold insurance to only one person, or had a high expectation that they would have to pay out all of their clients. Again this is not a "detail" - it is absolutely, completely fundamental to their business model. Yes, we can have insurance contracts between two parties with no risk pool, but without a risk pool the insurance industry would not exist. This is proven by the fact the insurance companies go bankrupt when things happen that were not accounted for in their risk model, thus causing too many payouts of insurance contracts. Without a risk pool, insurance would be ridiculously expensive to the point that almost no one would purchase it.

Also, in modern insurance there is no such thing as a completely personalized risk assessment. Your risk is partly (sometimes greatly, sometimes almost entirely, depending on the situation) is assessed based on the observed/assessed risk of the group(s) you belong to. For car insurance for example, your age, years of driving experience, sex, make, model and colour of car you drive, and adress have an influence on your premium.

So indeed, mass insurance in practice is indeed a socialization of costs. If 5000 people buy insurance, but only 50 are likely to require a payout in a given period, as a group they can each pay less. This is a fundamental concept that cannot be dismissed as a "detail".

Re:Scale of things

[TXG1112]

"No one buys insurance expecting up front to either subsidize other clients or be subsidized themselves"

The only reason people don't expect this is because they don't understand how insurance actually works. Apparently, you are one of these people.

Re:Scale of things

[bws111]

You're not making any sense. Suppose you paid $1K over 10 years for homeowners insurance. Your house burns down, and the insurance company pays $200K to rebuild. Where, exactly, do you think the other $190,000 (the subsidy) came from? From everyone else who paid premiums. Their premiums subsidized your loss. A subsidy of $0 is not insurance, it is a savings account. Why do you think many insurance companies have 'mutual' in the name? You are subsidizing someone else's loss, and they are subsidizing yours. The insurance company is, for a fee, managing the subsidies and nothing else.