Mario Rizzo

Executive VP & COO, Allstate

Search every verified Mario Rizzo interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Mario Rizzo, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Allstate, delivered a lecture on August 3, 2010, at the Foundation for Economic Education seminar "Advanced Austrian Economics," which was published online in 2019. In the lecture, Rizzo discussed economic concepts related to time, competition, and coordination, drawing on the ideas of economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He argued that competition is a process of discovery that produces novel and unpredictable outcomes, contrasting this with the traditional view of competition as a computational process that enforces equilibrium. Rizzo stated that attempts to guarantee people's expectations about market values would disable the discovery process responsible for coordinating economic activities. Rizzo also addressed the relationship between entrepreneurship and unpredictability, saying that the same factor responsible for adjusting to disequilibria—entrepreneurship and discovery of opportunities—also produces unpredictability, making coordination and unpredictability mutually connected in the real world. He suggested that good plans allow flexibility to change when something unexpected happens, and that better than maximizing profit is planning to survive over the long run by avoiding outcomes that knock a firm out of business. Rizzo noted that Hayek preferred the concept of order over equilibrium, describing it as "like a stream flowing with some attention to its banks."