RISK MODELS IN INSURANCE AND EPIDEMICS: A BRIDGE THROUGH RANDOMIZED POLYNOMIALS

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to construct a bridge between two classical topics in applied probability: the finite-time ruin probability in insurance and the final outcome distribution in epidemics. The two risk problems are reformulated in terms of the joint right-tail and left-tail distributions of order statistics for a sample of uniforms. This allows us to show that the hidden algebraic structures are of polynomial type, namely Appell in insurance and Abel–Gontcharoff in epidemics. These polynomials are defined with random parameters, which makes their mathematical study interesting in itself.