I hope that you will allow me first of all to congratulate Dr. Buhlmann on the excellent lecture he has given us and I am sure that you can all agree with me that after his general survey on experience rating and credibility, there is no need at all for me to go into the general aspects of the subject. Therefore I can start immediately to report on the contributions delivered, and I am very happy to state that, though the number of papers is rather small, namely six, their contents are qualitatively as high as has become usual at our ASTIN-Colloquia.

As regards the number of contributions I just mentioned, I like to draw your attention to the fact that because the present subject was on the programme of our last colloquium in Luzern too, in some cases we had to decide whether a contribution should be considered as relevant to subject I, or as a report on further work done on subjects from previous meetings. If perhaps in some cases our choice is not in accordance with the intention of the contributor I would like to apologize for that in advance. Moreover I wish to remind you that on Friday after the summaries of the discussions, Mr. Jansen will report on those papers submitted, which were not regarded as contributions to subject 1 or 2.

I would like to deal first with the papers of a more theoretical nature, afterwards going on to the contributions on special applications. Among the papers of general interest I ask your attention for the paper of Franckx entitled “Le comportement de l'assureur”. I consider this contribution as a very important attempt to compare the method of credibility theory, where as you know credibility is used as a function of the volume, with a method in which decisions are made in advance on the amount of certain levels of significance, in this way fixing what Franckx calls “le comportement a priori”.