Dynamic Surplus Optimization with Performance- and Index-Linked Liabilities

Abstract

The increasing importance of liability-driven investment strategies and the shift towards retirement products with lower guarantees and more performance participation provide challenges for the development of portfolio optimization frameworks which cover these aspects. To this end, we establish a general and flexible terminal-surplus optimization framework in continuous time, allowing for dynamic investment strategies and stochastic liabilities, which can be linked to the performance of an index or the asset portfolio of the insurance company. Besides optimality results in a fairly general surplus optimization setting, we obtain closed-form solutions for the optimal investment strategy for various specific liability models, which include the cases of index-linked and performance-linked liabilities and liabilities which are completely or only partly hedge-able. We compare the results in numerical examples and study the impact of the performance participation, un-hedge-able risk components, different ways of modeling the liabilities and the relative risk aversion parameter. We find that performance- or index-linked liabilities, which provide a close link between the wealth of the insurance company and its liabilities, allow for a higher allocation in the risky investment. On the other hand, un-hedge-able risks reduce the allocation in the risky investment. We conclude that, aiming at a high expected return for the policy holder, insurance companies should try to connect the performance of insurance products closely to the wealth and minimize un-hedge-able risks.