Optimal payout strategies when Bruno de Finetti meets model uncertainty

Abstract

Model uncertainty is ubiquitous and plays an important role in insurance and financial modeling. While a substantial effort has been given to studying optimal consumption, portfolio selection and investment problems in the presence of model uncertainty, relatively little attention is given to investigating optimal payout policies taking account of the impacts of model uncertainty. As one of the early attempts, this paper studies the optimal payout control problem under the classical risk model taking into account of model uncertainty about the claims arrival intensity. We aim to provide insights into understanding optimal decisions incorporating model uncertainty and to examine key impact of model uncertainty. We find that the optimal strategy robust to model uncertainty is of a band type. However, the presence of the model uncertainty alters the qualitative behavior of the optimal strategy in the sense that the optimal robust policy is no longer a barrier strategy for some particular cases. We provide numerical examples to illustrate the theoretical results and examine the impact of model uncertainty on optimal payout policies. We also provide examples that use real insurance data for calibration. We discover that the decision maker takes more conservative strategies under model uncertainty, which is consistent with the findings in the economic field and has not been addressed in the existing optimal payout problems without model uncertainty.