An individual loss reserving model with independent reporting and settlement

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to assess and demonstrate the advantage of claims reserving models based on individual data in forecasting future liabilities over traditional models on aggregate data both theoretically and numerically. The available information consists of the reporting delays, settlement delays and claim payments. The model settings include Poisson distributed frequency of claims produced by each policy, claims payable at the settlement time, and the amount of payment depending only on its settlement delay. While such settings are applicable to certain but not all practical cases, the principal purpose of the paper is to examine the efficiency of individual data against aggregate data. We refer to loss reserving as to estimate the projections of the outstanding liabilities on observed information. The efficiency of the individual loss reserving against classical aggregate loss reservings, namely Chain-Ladder (C-L) and Bornhuetter–Ferguson (B–F), is assessed by comparing the asymptotic variances of the errors in estimating the conditional expectation (projection) of the outstanding liability between individual, C-L and B–F reservings. The research shows a significant increase in the accuracy of loss reserving by using individual data compared with aggregate data.