Willis noted that at the end of 2008, many prognosticators believed the financial crisis would trigger a market-hardening. “What actually happened, though, was the opposite,” the report’s introduction reads.

This time around, with the eurozone crisis and fragile economy presenting similar, though not identical, challenges, Willis said the onset of a hard market may once again be restrained. The broker noted that one difference between today and 2008 is “the big question mark that hung over the future of AIG at the end of 2008, which forced AIG to retain business and offered its rivals the chance to compete for AIG’s business.”

Meanwhile, Towers Watson in mid-December released the results of its latest Commercial Lines Insurance Pricing Survey (CLIPS), showing that all standard commercial lines saw increases in pricing during 2011’s third quarter. Workers’ compensation and commercial property led the way with price increases. The results were mixed in specialty lines. Directors and officers’ liability, for example, saw price reductions for the seventh straight quarter.

But despite commercial pricing trending upward, Bruce Fell, managing director of Towers Watsons’ P&C practice in the Americas, said, “We will not be in a market where insurance-company results can improve and we start to enter a real hard market” until rate increases exceed loss-cost inflation.

Defining markets as hard or soft in the traditional sense may not even be relevant going forward, according to John Q. Doyle, CEO of global-commercial business for Chartis. During the 22nd Annual Executive Conference, produced by the National Underwriter Co. and Summit Business Media, owners of NU, Doyle said the traditional hard- and soft-market cycles may be replaced by shorter “micro cycles” due to the industry’s use of better tools to assess risk and allocate capital.

As these tools become more advanced and accurate, companies will be able to deploy capital more shrewdly, which could produce “shorter, flatter cycles” with “less up-and-down” fluctuations—unless, of course, there is an extraordinary, well-timed event.

A subsequent report by analyst firm ALIRT Insurance Research acknowledges that the industry has seen the emergence of improved data-mining capabilities, a more sophisticated/less-forgiving reinsurance market and a more expansive specialty market—all of which would seem to support the theory of flattening cycles. ALIRT analyzed 50 large U.S. P&C insurers representing about 53 percent of total industry net-written premiums through the first nine months of 2011, concluding that underwriting results have “weakened appreciably” so far this year, going by both accident-year and reported combined ratios—at 112.4 and 109.4, respectively—through the first nine months of 2011 (accident-year combined ratios exclude the impact of prior-year reserve development).

“One thing that has not changed is human nature,” the report adds. “So long as we, by nature, look to satisfy short-term desires at the expense of longer-term goals, a pronounced market cycle—at least in the commercial-lines market—will likely persist.”

Analyst firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW) also weighed in on the state of the market with its Property and Casualty Industry Update, stating that the pricing cycle is entering a phase that is “not in any way a traditional hard market.”

Prices have bottomed out and even risen in some cases, KBW says, but capital remains plentiful. The firm says it expects rate increases to be modest and not uniform: “For those well positioned, this environment could be a boon, but for others, it simply won’t be enough.”