Opinion ID: 186249
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Business Judgment and Risk Assessment

Text: 30 In a coda to its brief, the Air Force argues disclosure of the type of pricing information that is at issue in this case is unlikely to cause substantial competitive harm to McDonnell Douglas because a rival company can never understand fully or model precisely the business judgment and risk assessment that go into another firm's pricing decisions. 31 We recoil, as does McDonnell Douglas, from the implication of this argument, namely, a per se rule (or at least a strong presumption) that all constituent pricing information — as opposed to the bid price itself — is to be disclosed; such a rule would be squarely at odds with the protection we have always understood Exemption 4 to provide for such pricing information. See, e.g., NASA, 180 F.3d at 306; Widnall, 57 F.3d at 1164; Gulf & W. Indus., 615 F.2d at 530. To be sure, there may be, as the Air Force suggests, too many unascertainable, Acumenics Research & Technology v. Department of Justice, 843 F.2d 800, 808 (4th Cir.1988), or fluctuating, Martin Marietta Corp. v. Dalton, 974 F.Supp. 37, 40 (D.D.C.1997), variables for a firm to model exactly or to pinpoint precisely a rival's pricing strategy, but pinpoint precision is not required to inflict substantial competitive harm. 32