Study on insurance risk models with subexponential tails and dependence structures

Abstract

of thesis entitled STUDY ON INSURANCE RISK MODELS WITH SUBEXPONENTIAL TAILS AND DEPENDENCE STRUCTURES Submitted by CHEN YIQING for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in August 2009 In recent years, insurance risk studies in the presence of dependence structure and heavy-tailed claims are popular topics in actuarial science. In this thesis, we consider the renewal risk model with certain dependence structures, namely negative dependence and quasi-asymptotic independence. We also assume that claim sizes follow a heavy-tailed distribution, in particular, a subexponential distribution. We focus on studying the impact of heavy tails and dependence structures on ruin probabilities and the tail probabilities of aggregate claims. The asymptotic behavior of the ultimate ruin probability in the renewal risk model was studied in the presence of negatively dependent claim sizes and a constant force of interest. A purely probabilistic approach was employed to establish a simple asymptotic formula for the ruin probability. This result coincides with some known results in the recent literature, and discovers a phenomenon that heavy tails can offset the impact of the dependence structure of claim sizes on the ruin probability. A two-dimensional renewal risk model was considered in which the insurance company consists of two dependent classes of business. The dependence between the two classes comes from the fact that their claims arrive according to a common renewal counting process. For this model, several ruin probabilities were defined and simple asymptotic formulae for these ruin probabilities were derived. In particular, the obtained asymptotic formulae hold uniformly for all time horizons. This uniformity greatly enhances the theoretical value of the results. The next problem was to study precise estimates of the large deviation probabilities of aggregate claims with sizes which are negatively dependent. Specially, the problem for the so-called quasi renewal risk model was investigated in which inter-arrival times are also negatively dependent. A new dependence structure was considered and was termed “quasi-asymptotic independence” structure, which is more general and verifiable than some commonlyused dependence structures. The proposed dependence structure covers a wide range of positive and negative dependence. For the case of Pareto-like tails, the tail probability of the sum was proved to be asymptotically equivalent to the sum of tail probabilities. This confirms again that heavy tails offset the impact of dependence between summands. This result was then extended to randomly weighted sums and random sums. All the obtained results have obvious applications to concrete actuarial problems. In the last part of the thesis, each primary random variable representing the net loss during a period was associated with a random weight or a stochastic discount factor. Therefore, the weighted sum represents the stochastic present value of aggregate losses. Suppose that the primary random variables are long tailed, the weights are positive and bounded, and the primary random variables and their weights are independent. The tail probability of the maximum of the weighted sums was shown to be asymptotically equivalent to that of the last weighted sum. STUDY ON INSURANCE RISK MODELS WITH SUBEXPONENTIAL TAILS AND DEPENDENCE STRUCTURES