Optimal Reinsurance Model Research Articles

Risk sensitive control and an optimal reinsurance model of a network of insurance companies

Risk sensitive control and an optimal reinsurance model of a network of insurance companies

On optimal reinsurance in the presence of premium budget constraint and reinsurer’s risk limit

Abstract In this paper, we propose two new optimal reinsurance models in which both premium budget constraints and the reinsurer’s risk limits are taken into account. To be precise, we assume that the reinsurance premium has an upper bound, and that the admissible ceded loss functions have a pre-specified upper limit. Moreover, we assume that the reinsurance premium principle is calculated by the expected value premium principle. Under the optimality criteria of minimizing the value at risk and conditional value at risk of the insurer’s total risk exposure, we derive the explicit optimal reinsurance treaties, which are layer reinsurance treaties. A new approach is developed to construct the optimal reinsurance treaties. Comparisons with existing studies are also made. Finally, we provide a numerical study based on real data and an example to illustrate the proposed models and results. Our work provides a novel generalization of several known achievements in the literature.

Multi-constrained optimal reinsurance model from the duality perspectives

In the presence of multiple constraints such as the risk tolerance constraint and the budget constraint, many extensively studied (Pareto-)optimal reinsurance problems based on general distortion risk measures become technically challenging and have only been solved using ad hoc methods for certain special cases. In this paper, we extend the method developed in Lo (2017a) by proposing a generalized Neyman-Pearson framework to identify the optimal forms of the solutions. We then develop a dual formulation and show that the infinite-dimensional constrained optimization problems can be reduced to finite-dimensional unconstrained ones. With the support of the Nelder-Mead algorithm, we are able to obtain optimal solutions efficiently. We illustrate the versatility of our approach by working out several detailed numerical examples, many of which in the literature were only partially resolved.

Optimal reinsurance with general premium principles based on RVaR and WVaR

This paper studies the problem of optimal reinsurance design. Assuming that both the ceded and retained loss functions are increasing, we establish two optimal reinsurance models by minimizing the RVaR and WVaR risk measures of the total risk exposure of the insurer, respectively. Under RVaR, assuming that the premium principle satisfies distribution invariance, risk loading and preserving stop-loss order, we provide the optimal reinsurance treaty, which is a composition of two layer reinsurance treaties. Under WVaR, assuming that the premium principle satisfies distribution invariance, risk loading and preserving second-order stochastic dominance, we obtain the optimal reinsurance treaty, which is a stop-loss reinsurance. Finally, examples are given to illustrate the obtained results. Especially, when the claim is exponentially distributed, the explicit expressions for the optimal reinsurance treaties are given.

Multi-Constrained Optimal Reinsurance Model from the Generalized Neyman-Pearson and the Daulity Perspectives

Multi-Constrained Optimal Reinsurance Model from the Generalized Neyman-Pearson and the Daulity Perspectives

Pareto-Optimal Reinsurance Policies under TrTVaR Risk Measure

In this paper, we consider the problem of optimal reinsurance design, when the risk is measured by TrTVaR risk measure. We study optimal reinsurance models from the perspectives of both insurers and reinsurers. To reduce ex-post moral hazard, we assume that reinsurance contracts satisfy the principle of indemnity and the incentive-compatible constraint. When the losses of an insurer and a reinsurer are both measured by TrTVaR risk measures, we obtain the explicit forms of the Pareto-optimal reinsurance contracts under the expected value premium principle and TVaR premium principle, respectively.

Optimal reinsurance for both an insurer and a reinsurer under general premium principles

A reinsurance contract should consider the conflicting interests of the insurer and the reinsurer. An optimal reinsurance contract for one party may not be optimal for another party and it might be unacceptable for another party. Therefore, in this paper, we study the optimal reinsurance models from the perspective of both the insurer and the reinsurer by minimizing their total costs under the criteria of loss function which is defined by the joint value-at-risk, assuming that the reinsurance premium principles satisfy risk loading and stop-loss ordering preserving. We derive the optimal reinsurance policies over three ceded loss function sets, the change-loss reinsurance is optimal among the class of increasing convex ceded loss functions; when the constraints on both ceded and retained loss functions are relaxed to increasing functions, the layer reinsurance is shown to be optimal; the quota-share reinsurance with a limit is always optimal when the ceded loss functions are in the class of increasing concave functions. We further use the expectation premium principle and Dutch premium principle to illustrate the application of our results by deriving the optimal parameters.

A unifying approach to constrained and unconstrained optimal reinsurance

In this paper, we study two classes of optimal reinsurance models from perspectives of both insurers and reinsurers by minimizing their convex combination of the total losses where the risk is measured by a distortion risk measure and the reinsurance premium is calculated according to a distortion premium principle. In the first place, we show how to formulate the unconstrained optimization problem and constrained optimization problem in a unified way. Then, we propose a geometric approach to solve optimal reinsurance problems directly. This paper considers a class of increasing convex ceded loss functions and derives the explicit solutions of the optimal reinsurance, which can be in forms of quota-share, stop-loss, change-loss, the combination of quota-share and change-loss or the combination of change-loss and change-loss with different retentions. Finally, we consider two specific cases of the distortion risk measures: Value at Risk (VaR) and Tail Value at Risk (TVaR).

Budget-constrained optimal reinsurance design under coherent risk measures

ABSTRACTReinsurance is a versatile risk management strategy commonly employed by insurers to optimize their risk profile. In this paper, we study an optimal reinsurance design problem minimizing a general law-invariant coherent risk measure of the net risk exposure of a generic insurer, in conjunction with a general law-invariant comonotonic additive convex reinsurance premium principle and a premium budget constraint. Due to its intrinsic generality, this contract design problem encompasses a wide body of optimal reinsurance models commonly encountered in practice. A three-step solution scheme is presented. Firstly, the objective and constraint functions are exhibited in the so-called Kusuoka's integral representations. Secondly, the mini-max theorem for infinite dimensional spaces is applied to interchange the infimum on the space of indemnities and the supremum on the space of probability measures. Thirdly, the recently developed Neyman–Pearson methodology due to Lo (2017a) is adopted to solve the resulting infimum problem. Analytic and transparent expressions for the optimal reinsurance policy are provided, followed by illustrative examples.

Budget-Constrained Optimal Reinsurance Design Under Coherent Risk Measures

Reinsurance is a versatile risk management strategy commonly employed by insurers to optimize their risk profile. In this paper, we study an optimal reinsurance design problem minimizing a general law-invariant coherent risk measure of the net risk exposure of a generic insurer, in conjunction with a general law-invariant comonotonic additive convex reinsurance premium principle and a premium budget constraint. Due to its intrinsic generality, this contract design problem encompasses a wide body of optimal reinsurance models encountered in practice. A three-step solution scheme is presented. Firstly, the objective and constraint functions are exhibited in the so-called Kusuoka's integral representations. Secondly, the mini-max theorem for infinite dimensional spaces is applied to interchange the infimum on the space of indemnities and the supremum on the space of probability measures. Thirdly, the recently developed Neyman-Pearson methodology due to Lo (2017) is adopted to solve the resulting infimum problem. Analytic and transparent expressions for the optimal reinsurance policy are provided, followed by illustrative examples.

Optimal Reinsurance Under the Risk-Adjusted Value of an Insurer’s Liability and an Economic Reinsurance Premium Principle

In this article, an optimal reinsurance problem is formulated from the perspective of an insurer, with the objective of minimizing the risk-adjusted value of its liability where the valuation is carried out by a cost-of-capital approach and the capital at risk is calculated by either the value-at-risk (VaR) or conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). In our reinsurance arrangement, we also assume that both insurer and reinsurer are obligated to pay more for a larger realization of loss as a way of reducing ex post moral hazard. A key contribution of this article is to expand the research on optimal reinsurance by deriving explicit optimal reinsurance solutions under an economic premium principle. It is a rather general class of premium principles that includes many weighted premium principles as special cases. The advantage of adopting such a premium principle is that the resulting reinsurance premium depends not only on the risk ceded but also on a market economic factor that reflects the market environment or the risk the reinsurer is facing. This feature appears to be more consistent with the reinsurance market. We show that the optimal reinsurance policies are piecewise linear under both VaR and CVaR risk measures. While the structures of optimal reinsurance solutions are the same for both risk measures, we also formally show that there are some significant differences, particularly on the managing tail risk. Because of the integration of the market factor (via the reinsurance pricing) into the optimal reinsurance model, some new insights on the optimal reinsurance design could be gleaned, which would otherwise be impossible for many of the existing models. For example, the market factor has a nontrivial effect on the optimal reinsurance, which is greatly influenced by the changes of the joint distribution of the market factor and the loss. Finally, under an additional assumption that the market factor and the loss have a copula with quadratic sections, we demonstrate that the optimal reinsurance policies admit relatively simple forms to foster the applicability of our theoretical results, and a numerical example is presented to further highlight our results.

A NEYMAN-PEARSON PERSPECTIVE ON OPTIMAL REINSURANCE WITH CONSTRAINTS

AbstractThe formulation of optimal reinsurance policies that take various practical constraints into account is a problem commonly encountered by practitioners. In the context of a distortion-risk-measure-based optimal reinsurance model without moral hazard, this article introduces and employs a variation of the Neyman–Pearson Lemma in statistical hypothesis testing theory to solve a wide class of constrained optimal reinsurance problems analytically and expeditiously. Such a Neyman–Pearson approach identifies the unit-valued derivative of each ceded loss function as the test function of an appropriate hypothesis test and transforms the problem of designing optimal reinsurance contracts to one that resembles the search of optimal test functions achieved by the classical Neyman–Pearson Lemma. As an illustration of the versatility and superiority of the proposed Neyman–Pearson formulation, we provide complete and transparent solutions of several specific constrained optimal reinsurance problems, many of which were only partially solved in the literature by substantially more difficult means and under extraneous technical assumptions. Examples of such problems include the construction of the optimal reinsurance treaties in the presence of premium budget constraints, counterparty risk constraints and the optimal insurer–reinsurer symbiotic reinsurance treaty considered recently in Cai et al. (2016).

Optimal multivariate quota-share reinsurance: A nonparametric mean-CVaR framework

In this paper, the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is adopted to measure the total loss of multiple lines of insurance business and two nonparametric estimation methods are introduced to explore the optimal multivariate quota-share reinsurance under a mean-CVaR framework. While almost all the existing literature on optimal reinsurance are based on a probabilistic derivation, the present paper relies on a statistical analysis. The proposed optimal reinsurance models are directly formulated on empirical data and no explicit distributional assumption on the underlying risk vector is required. The resulting nonparametric reinsurance models are convex and computationally amenable, circumventing the difficulty of computing CVaR of the sum of a generally dependent random vector. Statistical consistency of the resulting estimators for the best CVaR is established for both nonparametric models, allowing empirical data to be generated from any stationary process satisfying strong mixing conditions. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to show that a routine bootstrap procedure can capture the distributions of the resulting risk measures well for independent data.

Optimal Reinsurance Design: A Mean-Variance Approach

In this article, we study an optimal reinsurance model from the perspective of an insurer who has a general mean-variance preference. In order to reduce ex post moral hazard, we assume that both parties in a reinsurance contract are obligated to pay more for a larger realization of loss. We further assume that the reinsurance premium is calculated only based on the mean and variance of the indemnity. This class of premium principles is quite general in the sense that it includes many widely used premium principles such as expected value, mean value, variance, and standard deviation principles. Moreover, to protect the insurer's profit, a lower bound is imposed on its expected return. We show that any admissible reinsurance policy is dominated by a change-loss reinsurance or a dual change-loss reinsurance, depending upon the coefficient of variation of the ceded loss. Further, the change-loss reinsurance is shown to be optimal if the premium loading increases in the actuarial value of the coverage; while it becomes decreasing, the optimal reinsurance policy is in the form of dual change loss. As a result, the quota-share reinsurance is always optimal for any variance-related reinsurance premium principle. Finally, some numerical examples are applied to illustrate the applicability of the theoretical results.

A unifying approach to risk-measure-based optimal reinsurance problems with practical constraints

The design of optimal reinsurance treaties in the presence of multifarious practical constraints is a substantive but underdeveloped topic in modern risk management. To examine the influence of these constraints on the contract design systematically, this article formulates a generic constrained reinsurance problem where the objective and constraint functions take the form of Lebesgue integrals whose integrands involve the unit-valued derivative of the ceded loss function to be chosen. Such a formulation provides a unifying framework to tackle a wide body of existing and novel distortion-risk-measure-based optimal reinsurance problems with constraints that reflect diverse practical considerations. Prominent examples include insurers’ budgetary, regulatory and reinsurers’ participation constraints. An elementary and intuitive solution scheme based on an extension of the cost–benefit technique in Cheung and Lo [Cheung, K.C. & Lo, A. (2015, in press). Characterizations of optimal reinsurance treaties: a cost–benefit approach Scandinavian Actuarial Journal. doi:10.1080/03461238.2015.1054303.] is proposed and illuminated by analytically identifying the optimal risk-sharing schemes in several concrete optimal reinsurance models of practical interest. Particular emphasis is placed on the economic implications of the above constraints in terms of stimulating or curtailing the demand for reinsurance, and how these constraints serve to reconcile the possibly conflicting objectives of different parties.

CDF formulation for solving an optimal reinsurance problem

An innovative cumulative distribution function (CDF)-based method is proposed for deriving optimal reinsurance contracts to maximize an insurer’s survival probability. The optimal reinsurance model is a non-concave constrained stochastic maximization problem, and the CDF-based method transforms it into a functional concave programming problem of determining an optimal CDF over a corresponding feasible set. Compared to the existing literature, our proposed CDF formulation provides a more transparent derivation of the optimal solutions, and more interestingly, it enables us to study a further complex model with an extra background risk and more sophisticated premium principle.

Marginal Indemnification Function formulation for optimal reinsurance

In this paper, we propose to combine the Marginal Indemnification Function (MIF) formulation and the Lagrangian dual method to solve optimal reinsurance model with distortion risk measure and distortion reinsurance premium principle. The MIF method exploits the absolute continuity of admissible indemnification functions and formulates optimal reinsurance model into a functional linear programming of determining an optimal measurable function valued over a bounded interval. The MIF method was recently introduced to analyze the reinsurance model but without premium budget constraint. In this paper, a Lagrangian dual method is applied to combine with MIF to solve for optimal reinsurance solutions under premium budget constraint. Compared with the existing literature, the proposed integrated MIF-based Lagrangian dual method provides a more technically convenient and transparent solution to the optimal reinsurance design. To demonstrate the practicality of the proposed method, analytical solution is derived on a particular reinsurance model that involves minimizing Conditional Value at Risk (a special case of distortion function) and with the reinsurance premium being determined by the inverse-S shaped distortion principle.

Optimal VaR-based risk management with reinsurance

It is well-known that reinsurance can be an effective risk management solution for financial institutions such as the insurance companies. The optimal reinsurance solution depends on a number of factors including the criterion of optimization and the premium principle adopted by the reinsurer. In this paper, we analyze the Value-at-Risk based optimal risk management solution using reinsurance under a class of premium principles that is monotonic and piecewise. The monotonic piecewise premium principles include not only those which preserve stop-loss ordering, but also the piecewise premium principles which are monotonic and constructed by concatenating a series of premium principles. By adopting the monotonic piecewise premium principle, our proposed optimal reinsurance model has a number of advantages. In particular, our model has the flexibility of allowing the reinsurer to use different risk loading factors for a given premium principle or use entirely different premium principles depending on the layers of risk. Our proposed model can also analyze the optimal reinsurance strategy in the context of multiple reinsurers that may use different premium principles (as attributed to the difference in risk attitude and/or imperfect information). Furthermore, by artfully imposing certain constraints on the ceded loss functions, the resulting model can be used to capture the reinsurer’s willingness and/or capacity to accept risk or to control counterparty risk from the perspective of the insurer. Under some technical assumptions, we derive explicitly the optimal form of the reinsurance strategies in all the above cases. In particular, we show that a truncated stop-loss reinsurance treaty or a limited stop-loss reinsurance treaty can be optimal depending on the constraint imposed on the retained and/or ceded loss functions. Some numerical examples are provided to further compare and contrast our proposed models to the existing models.

VaR Criteria for optimal limited change-loss and truncated change-loss reinsurance

Reinsurance can provide an effective way for insurer to manage its risk exposure. In this paper, we further analyze the optimal reinsurance models recently proposed by J. Cai and K. S. Tan [Astin Bulletin, 2007, 37(1): 93–112]. With the criteria of minimizing the value-at-risk (VaR) risk measure of insurer’s total loss exposure, we derive the optimal values of sharing proportion a, retention d, and layer l of two reinsurance treaties: the limited change-loss f(x) = a{(x − d)+ − (x − l)+} and the truncated change-loss f(x) = a(x−d)+I(x⩽l). Both of the reinsurance plans have been considered to be more realistic and practical in the real business. Our solutions have several appealing features: (i) there is only one condition to verify for the existence of optimal limited change-loss reinsurance while there always exists an optimal truncated change-loss reinsurance, (ii) the resulting optimal parameters have simple analytic forms which depend only on assumed loss distribution, reinsurer’s safety loading, and insurer’s risk tolerance, (iii) the optimal retention d for limited change-loss reinsurance is the same as that by Cai and Tan while the optimal value is smaller for truncated change-loss, (iv) the optimal sharing proportion and layer are always the same for both reinsurance plans, (v) minimized VaR are strictly lower than the values derived by Cai and Tan, (vi) the optimization results reveal possible drawbacks of VaR-based risk management that a heavy tail risk exposure may be expressed by lower VaR.

Optimal reinsurance under the Haezendonck risk measure

In this work, we study the optimal reinsurance under the Haezendonck risk measure by minimizing the total risk of the insurer. Firstly, the optimal reinsurance model with the expectation premium principle is proposed. Then, on the basis of our model, the explicit solution is obtained, i.e. the stop-loss function. On the other hand, our result can be considered as a promotion of the optimal reinsurance under the CVaR risk measure since CVaR is only a specific case of the Haezendonck risk measure.