Insurance Literature Research Articles

Customer price sensitivities in competitive insurance markets

Insurers are increasingly adopting more demand-based strategies to incorporate the indirect effect of premium changes on their policyholders’ willingness to stay. However, since in practice both insurers’ renewal premia and customers’ responses to these premia typically depend on the customer’s level of risk, it remains challenging in these strategies to determine how to properly control for this confounding. We therefore consider a causal inference approach in this paper to account for customers’ price sensitivity and to deduce optimal, multi-period profit maximizing premium renewal offers. More specifically, we extend the discrete treatment framework of Guelman and Guillén (2014) by Extreme Gradient Boosting, or XGBoost, and by multiple imputation to better account for the uncertainty in the counterfactual responses. We additionally introduce the continuous treatment framework with XGBoost to the insurance literature to allow identification of the exact optimal renewal offers and account for any competition in the market by including competitor offers. The application of the two treatment frameworks to a Dutch automobile insurance portfolio suggests that a policy’s competitiveness in the market is crucial for a customer’s price sensitivity and that XGBoost is more appropriate to describe this than the traditional logistic regression. Moreover, an efficient frontier of both frameworks indicates that substantially more profit can be gained on the portfolio than realized, also already with less churn and in particular if we allow for continuous rate changes. A multi-period renewal optimization confirms these findings and demonstrates that the competitiveness enables temporal feedback of previous rate changes on future demand.

The impact of state surprise medical billing protections on consumers with employer-sponsored health insurance

This article used consumer survey data to investigate the impact of state surprise medical billing protections on consumers with employer-sponsored health insurance. State protections were categorized as comprehensive, partial, and none following the Commonwealth Fund (2019). Our results indicated that consumers with employer- sponsored health insurance who lived in states with comprehensive surprise medical billing protections were more likely to report receiving surprise medical bills than those who lived in states with no protections. We offer several explanations for this result, including that state protections do not apply to self-funded health care plans. Regarding differences across ages, we found that consumers ages 45 to 60 were more likely to receive a surprise medical bill, which is consistent with the age distribution of those receiving the highest proportion of surgical and non-surgical procedures. With these results, our study contributes to the health insurance literature by deepening our understanding of surprise medical billing regarding both consumer knowledge and the impact of state regulation.

The demand for life insurance in a developing country and the mediating role of persuasion

This study examines the demand for life insurance in a rapidly developing economic environment in South East Asia, focusing on Malaysia. The study extends the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) by introducing a mediating variable ‘Persuasion’ in examining the demand for life insurance among policy buyers. Fuelled by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the life insurance market is expected to grow significantly and the role of the state and regulatory body to regulate this process would be pivotal. Given the increasing significance of this industry both before and after the epidemic, this study identifies seven research variables from previous literature sources related to finance and international insurance, including financial literacy, saving motives, religiosity, risk aversion, agent, persuasion and purchase intention of life insurance. A causal research design is used to formulate research framework and testable hypotheses for this study. Data collection encompasses face to face interviews with 385 life insurance policy holders between May 2019 and March 2020 by using a survey questionnaire. Data analysis is mainly based on PLS-SEM method by using SPSS and Smart PLS statistical software packages. Results reveal persuasion as an important construct that explains the demand for life insurance, while agent is found to have the highest impact towards persuasion. The study also finds a full mediation effect of persuasion in the demand for life insurance for risk aversion and agent. These findings add new insights to the body of knowledge in life insurance literatures. Furthermore, research is useful for policy makers including government, finance, and insurance agencies;and recommends relevant strategies to further improve life insurance penetration in the population.

Notes on Optimal Reintegration Contracts

ABSTRACT Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs are known to be a necessary component to achieve sustainable peace after an armed conflict. The main goal of this type of program is to help the transition for former soldiers from war to a sustainable legal economic activity. However, due to weak institutions and poor design and implementation, such programs often result in many former soldiers ending up unemployed, in criminal activities, or returning to armed rebel groups. In this paper, I propose an optimal reintegration contract using tools from unemployment insurance literature. In this model, a principal (government) collects taxes from the community to fund a reintegration program that gives incentives to agents (insurgent soldiers) to leave war and search for a job. I describe how information asymmetries and the conditions of labor and crime markets shape the benefits scheme offered by the principal and the selection of insurgents who join the reintegration program.

Life insurance purchase behaviour: A systematic review and directions for future research

AbstractThis paper presents a framework‐based systematic review of existing research to understand the purchase behaviour of consumers for life insurance products. The TCM framework is adopted to provide an organized review of the theory, context and methods used in the articles under review. Antecedents, decisions and outcomes in the context of consumers’ life insurance purchase behaviour are also discussed in detail using the ADO framework. The review aggregates 136 unique antecedents derived from 76 relevant articles and classifies them into eight broad categories. Further, the reasons for obtaining a positive or negative effect of a particular antecedent on life insurance purchase decisions or outcomes are also fully explored. Finally, TCM and ADO frameworks are used to identify the research gaps in the extant life insurance literature. Some of the important future avenues of the research, especially from the perspective of behavioural economics and pandemic scenarios such as COVID‐19, are then explored.

Road Safety for Fleets of Vehicles

Road safety for fleets of vehicles has been neglected in the insurance literature, mainly because appropriate data is not available. This paper makes a threefold contribution: 1) Produce statistics on current fleets’ road safety offences using a panel of 20 years of data on truck fleets; 2) relate these offences to fleets’ accidents; and 3) identify and classify the riskiest fleets for insurance ratemaking based on past experience in managing road safety. Our results show a substantial heterogeneity between fleets in terms of road safety.

Cyber Risk Modeling: A Discrete Multivariate Count Process Approach

In the past decade, cyber insurance has raised much interest in the insurance industry, and cyber risk has evolved from a type of pure operational risk to both operational and liability risk for insurers. However, the modeling of cyber risk is still in its infancy. Compared with other insurance risks, cyber risk has some unique features. In particular, discrete variables regularly arise both in the frequency component (e.g. number of events per unit time), and the severity component (e.g. the number of data breaches for each cyber event). In addition, the modeling of these count variables are further complicated by nonstandard properties such as zero inflation, serial and cross-sectional correlations, as well as heavy tails. Previous cyber risk models have largely focused on continuous models that are incompatible with many of these characteristics. This paper introduces a new count-based frequency-severity framework to the insurance literature, with a negative binomial autoregressive process for the multivariate frequency component, and the generalized Poisson inverse-Gaussian distribution for the severity component. We unify these new modeling tools by proposing a tractable Generalized Method of Moments for their estimation and apply them to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) dataset.

THE ANALYSIS OF THE PARTICIPATION INSURANCE PREMIUMS PRODUCTION IN TERMS OF ITS CONTRIBUTION TO TURKISH INSURANCE SECTOR

Sigorta; bireylerin ve kurumların belli bir miktar para ödenmesi yoluyla toplanan tutarların, bireylerin, kurumların ve varlıkların zarara uğramaları halinde zararın karşılanmasında kullanıldığı bir risk transferidir. Bu yolla toplanan primler vasıtası ile ülke ekonomisi için önemli bir tasarruf kaynağı yaratılmaktadır. Bu çalışmada; son yıllarda sigortacılık literatürüne giren Katılım Sigortacılığı (Tekâfül) hakkında genel bilgiler verildikten sonra Genel Sigortacılığa prim üretimi bazında katkıları değerlendirilmiştir. Katılım Sigortacılığı, Genel sigortacılığın; faiz, belirsizlik ve kumar gibi etmenlerden arındırılmış bir alternatifi olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Bu çalışmayla Katılım Sigortacılığı ve diğer sigortacılık sistemlerinin kavramsal çerçeveleri açıklanmış ve bu uygulamaların benzer ve farklı yönleri ortaya konulmuştur. Daha sonra Katılım Sigortacılığı sisteminin yapısı, özellikleri, ilkeleri ve metodları anlatılmıştır. Türkiye’deki Katılım Sigortacılığı güncel verilerine dayanılarak sektördeki son durumu ortaya konulmaya çalışılmıştır. Çalışmanın amacı; Türkiye’de Katılım Sigortacılığı prim üretiminin, Genel Sigortacılık prim üretimi içerisindeki payının değerlendirmesini yapmaktır. Bu amaçla 2014-2018 yılları arasındaki son 5 yıllık Katılım Sigortacılığı prim üretimi ve Genel Sigortacılık prim üretimi verileri Türkiye Sigorta Birliği (https://www.tsb.org.tr/) internet sitesinden temin edilerek oransal analizi ve değerlendirmesi yapılmıştır. Değerlendirme neticesinde; Katılım Sigortacılığının Genel Sigortacılık prim üretimine her yıl artan oranda katkı sağladığı gözlenmiştir. Ayrıca Katılım Sigortacılığı yapan şirket sayısının da her yıl artış gösterdiği görülmektedir.

Pareto-optimal reinsurance policies with maximal synergy

Optimal reinsurance policies have been studied extensively in the economics and insurance literature. Two types of optimality criteria, expected utility (EU) maximization and risk minimization, are commonly used. Understandably, applying the two types of criteria usually will result in different “optimal” policies. To reconcile the conflicting interests of the insurer and reinsurer and strike a balance between EU maximization and risk minimization, we follow the approach in Borch (1960b) but assume that the involved two parties both apply distortion risk measures instead of variance. We first identify a set of reinsurance policies that minimize the total risk borne by the two parties, then we take this set of policies as admissible and derive the Pareto-optimal policies that maximize the weighted EU of these two parties. A Nash bargaining model is applied to identify the “best” weights allocated to the two parties. In addition, we extend our results to a situation where the insurer’s decision making is dictated by the rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU) theory. Finally, we present numerical examples to show the applicability of our methodology and some implications of the obtained results.

Research on the improvement of technical efficiency of China's property insurance industry: a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis

PurposeFrom the perspective of cause and effect, the operational processes of property insurance companies can be considered as historical events. The purpose of this study is to measure the operating efficiency of China's property insurance industry, explore the determinants that affect technical efficiency and outline the path to achieving high-quality development.Design/methodology/approachWe chose 44 Chinese property insurance companies as research objects. The data were obtained from the Chinese Insurance Yearbook and China Statistical Yearbook 2015–2017. First, the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method was used to calculate the technical efficiency of property insurance companies. Then, Tobit regression and quantile regression were adopted to explore the influencing factors of technical efficiency. Finally, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method was employed to summarize the path to improving the operating efficiency of property insurance companies.FindingsThe empirical results in the first stage suggested that the operation efficiency of China's property insurance industry was technically inefficient, and the scale efficiency was relatively better than the pure technical efficiency. In the second stage, we observed that the drivers for firm size, reinsurance rate, claim ratio and equity restriction were important determinants of an insurance firm's efficiency.Research limitations/implicationsWe also put forward four applicable, targeted and proven ways to improve the technical efficiency of property insurance companies. These configurations are verified by cases of existing property insurance companies, which can provide practical references for the insurance industry.Originality/valueOur research enriches the insurance literature and efficiency methods, particularly regarding the specific paths of improving the technical efficiency. The relationship between elements and results is analyzed from a systematic perspective, and the research results are not only more consistent with what logic might imply but also more instructive for the improvement of reality.

Insurance and economic policy uncertainty

Just as the world has witnessed the increased importance of the insurance sector over the past few decades, it has also witnessed a sharp rise in risks and uncertainties. Surprisingly, studies analyzing the relationship between economic policy uncertainty and the insurance sector are almost non-existent. Another major limitation of insurance literature is the choice of methodology. Most studies on the insurance sector do not take into consideration issues of heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence, and are therefore subject to errors. To address the identified gaps, this research investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty on insurance premiums in a panel of 15 countries over the period 1998–2016 by employing heterogeneous panel estimation techniques with cross-sectional dependence. The Durbin-Hausman cointegration tests of Westerlund (2008) confirm that a long-run relationship exists between the variables. Findings from the error correction based panel estimations show that the insurance sector is not immune to the effects of economic policy uncertainty. Economic policy uncertainty raises insurance premiums both in the short and long run, although the long-run impact is greater than the short-run impact. In addition, economic policy uncertainty exerts a bigger influence on non-life insurance premium than on life insurance premium, indicating that the economic risks covered by non-life insurance are more sensitive to uncertainty than the mortality and longevity risks covered by life insurance. Our findings further show that national income, education, population, financial development and institutional quality all raise insurance premiums, while inflation lowers insurance premiums.

The linkage between life insurer spread behaviour and credit swap transaction: policyholder protection analysis

ABSTRACT The paper develops a contingent claim model to evaluate the equity of a life insurer when the insurer could act as a protection buyer or a protection seller in a credit swap transaction market. The investment market and the life insurance market faced by the insurer are assumed to be imperfectly competitive in order to capture the insurer’s asset-leading or liability-reducing spread behaviour. This paper complements the insurance literature by analysing how the effects of credit swap transactions on insurer spread behaviour and policyholder protection, and how they might differ across various degrees of capital regulation, premature default risk, and profit-sharing participation. Our findings offer some useful insights for achieving the stability of the insurance system.

Health as an Insurance Category

The article sets out a scientific view of the essence of the category health, reveals its significance for the insurance business. It studies and presents the features of this phenomenon that are important for organizations and implementation of individual areas of insurance activities, as well as the difficulties and problems they cause, which insurance organizations face. It presents a set of insurance types, oriented towards protection of interests related to the insured persons health. The article expresses and substantiates an opinion of quality of the classifications presented in the insurance literature. It proves the necessity to specify the conceptual apparatus of the health insurance and presents a proposal of introducing corresponding amendments to the p. 3, Art. 4, pp. 4, Art. 32.9 of the Federal Law No. 4015-1 of November 27, 1992 On Organization of Insurance Business in the Russian Federation.

Risk aversion level influence on farmer's decision to participate in crop insurance: A review

Agricultural insurance in Indonesia is focused specifically on rice farming and is locally known as Asuransi Usahatani Padi (AUTP). To encourage farmer participation, the government subsidises farmers’ cost of insurance (premium) by 80%. Despite high subsidy, AUTP is still unable to reach the coverage target. The objectives of this study are to investigate farmers’ Risk Aversion Level (RAL), its influence on farmers’ decision to participate in AUTP, and the effect of farmers’ participation in AUTP on their income. The result of this study can contribute to enriching agriculture insurance literature from the point of view of developing countries and catalyse other studies on this matter especially in Indonesia. The analysis methods used in this study were multiple pricelist designs and propensity score matching with a logistic regression model. 130 farmers were interviewed. The results showed that farmers tend to have a high level of risk aversion (82.3% of farmers insure almost all of their land). RAL has a significant effect on farmers’ decision to purchase AUTP (< 0.01). A positive value of Average Treatment on the Treated (ATT) indicated that participation in AUTP has a positive impact on farmers’ income. AUTP is able to absorb production risks and encourage use of high input in farming.

Agricultural Insurance Ratemaking: Development of a New Premium Principle

Determining the appropriate premium to charge for the underlying risk is central to delivering a sustainable agricultural insurance program. Though this is fundamental to all types of insurance, in agriculture this is a particularly challenging task given systemic risk, information asymmetry, and a number of multifaceted factors pertaining to the loss experience data, including scarcity and credibility. The objective of this article is to formally introduce premium principles to the agricultural insurance literature, with a focus on a new premium principle approach based on the multivariate weighted distribution. The multivariate weighted premium principle (MWPP) formalizes the reweighting of historical loss experience using auxiliary factors in order to refine the agricultural insurance pricing. These auxiliary factors may reflect systemic risk and include material information, such as economic and market conditions, weather, soil, etc. In the empirical study, a unique reinsurance data set from the province of Manitoba, Canada, is used to evaluate a number of potential premium principles. With the flexibility of the MWPP, the empirical results indicate that the MWPP approach can be a viable premium principle for pricing agricultural insurance. Furthermore, the MWPP redistributes premium rates and assigns increased loadings to higher risk layers, helping reinsurers manage their reserves and achieve improved sustainability in the long term.

The Moderating Role of Risk Aversion on Adoption of IT and Mobile Platforms on P&C Insurance Demand

This article studies the comparative efficiency of information communication technology (ICT)-enabled platforms in the property and casualty (P&C) domain by studying moderating role of risk aversion. This slow rate of ICT-enabled channel in property and casualty insurance (PCI) domain does not gain ample attention in the extant literature. The present article argues that the impact of ICT enabled platforms may have different outcomes on PCI consumption due to moderating role of risk aversion. In insurance literature, risk aversion is a critical factor. Therefore, the current study has empirically tested the direct and interaction (with risk aversion) effects of ICT and mobile platforms on PCI demand in developing countries. The current study has found that secondary education positively impacts adoption of mobile platforms whereas tertiary education positively impacts adoption overall ICT-enabled selling platforms. However, the uncertainty avoidance index adversely impacts both the selling channels in PCI domain.

Reinsurance Policies with Maximal Synergy

Optimal reinsurance policies have been studied extensively in the economics and insurance literature. Two types of optimality criteria are commonly used: maximizing the expected utility (EU) or minimizing risks. Understandably, applying the two types of criteria usually will result in different “optimal” policies. To strike a balance between maximizing utility and minimizing risk, Borch (1960b) derived the EU-maximizing reinsurance policies assuming that the admissible policies are those that minimize the total variance of the losses borne by the two parties. This in fact implies that only quota-share policies are admissible and greatly simplifies the problem. In this paper, we follow the approach in Borch (1960b). However, we assume that the two parties apply distortion risk measures instead of variance. We first identify a set of reinsurance policies that minimize the total risk shared by the two parties, then we take this set of policies as admissible and determine the Pareto-optimal policies that maximize the EU of the two parties. In contrast to the results in Borch (1960b), we show that applying risk measures such as the Value at Risk (VaR) and the Tail Value at Risk (TVaR) results in multi-layered policies.

Does the design matter? Comparing satellite-based indices for insuring pastoralists against drought

For those developing satellite-based insurance products, there is no consensus in the scientific community on which of the many available indices most accurately track agro-ecological shocks as experienced by farmers and pastoralists. Furthermore, metrics commonly used by the remote sensing community for assessing the accuracy of indices in retrieving biophysical variables are insufficient in the case of insurance, because they do not consider the value of insurance coverage in terms of household welfare. This study begins to fill this knowledge gap by bridging two index insurance literatures: the remote sensing science literature that focuses on the predictive power of indices, and the economic literature that focuses on welfare outcomes. The article uses a longitudinal panel of household survey data from Kenya to compare the quality of existing and potential insurance products. These products are developed from different processing chains applied to time series of the satellite-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Although the indices are highly correlated to each other (ρ > 0.95), a utility analysis provides insight into how small differences can lead to larger differences in product value. Our results highlight that index accuracy, cost, and timeliness of payments must be considered jointly when assessing insurance quality for clients.

Impact of Preferences on Optimal Insurance in the Presence of Multiple Policyholders

In the optimal insurance literature one typically studies optimal risk sharing between one insurer (or reinsurer) and one policyholder. However, the insurance business is based on diversification benefits that arise when pooling many insurance policies. In this paper, we first show that results on optimal insurance that are valid in the case of a single policyholder extend to the case of multiple policyholders, provided their insurance claims are independent. However, due to natural catastrophes, increasing life expectancy and terrorism events, insurance claims show tendency to be correlated. Interestingly, in the case of interdependent insurance policies, it may become optimal for the insurer to refuse selling insurance to some prospects, based on their attitude towards risk or due to their risk exposure characteristics. This finding calls for government policies to ensure that insurance stays available and affordable to everyone.

Optimal Insurance Policy Indemnity Schedules With Policyholders’ Limited Liability and Background Risk

AbstractThis article makes two contributions to the insurance literature by studying optimal insurance policy indemnity schedules with policyholders’ limited liability and background risk. First, generalizing a prominent approach by Huberman, Mayers, and Smith (1983), it is shown that a welfare subsidy in the case of a ruinous loss may make the insurance premium “overly fair” for nonbankrupting losses and full insurance for this event becomes optimal. Second, introducing correlated background risk into this limited liability framework relativizes or even turns results by Doherty and Schlesinger (1983) as to the impact of background risk on optimal coverage into its opposite.