Robust optimal strategies for an insurer with reinsurance and investment under benchmark and mean-variance criteria

Abstract

In this paper, an ambiguity-averse insurer (AAI) whose surplus process is approximated by a Brownian motion with drift, hopes to manage risk by both investing in a Black–Scholes financial market and transferring some risk to a reinsurer, but worries about uncertainty in model parameters. She chooses to find investment and reinsurance strategies that are robust with respect to this uncertainty, and to optimize her decisions in a mean-variance framework. By the stochastic dynamic programming approach, we derive closed-form expressions for a robust optimal benchmark strategy and its corresponding value function, in the sense of viscosity solutions, which allows us to find a mean-variance efficient strategy and the efficient frontier. Furthermore, economic implications are analyzed via numerical examples. In particular, our conclusion in the mean-variance framework differs qualitatively, for certain parameter ranges, with model-uncertainty robustness conclusions in the framework of utility functions: model uncertainty does not always result in an agent deciding to reduce risk exposure under mean-variance criteria, opposite to the conclusions for utility functions in Maenhout and Liu. Our conclusion can be interpreted as saying that the mean-variance problem for the AAI explains certain counter-intuitive investor behaviors, by which the attitude to risk exposure, for an AAI facing model uncertainty, depends on positive past experience.