In order to make this report clear to those without experience in insurance matters, we first present some basic facts about the insurance business. In so doing we intentionally omit certain facts irrelevant to the present study. The most important omission of this kind is our assumption that the insurance business operates without administrative expenses and without sales costs. We also assume that the insurance business is run in such a way that no profit is made. It will be evident to readers already directly connected with insurance problems what further omissions we have made and why we have made them.

Insurance is the establishment of a contract between the insurance company and the insured person This contract is by tradition called the “insurance policy” and the insured person is called the “policyholder”. By agreeing to the insurance policy, the policyholder commits himself to paying certain premiums to the insurance company, and the insurance company commits itself to paying certain amounts to the policyholders. The conditions under which such payments are to be made are of many different kinds: the policy-holder dies, the policyholder becomes ill, a homeowner's house is burnt down, or the policyholder has a collision in his car. The circumstances under which a payment is to be made to the policy-holder are described in detail in the insurance policy. The amount to be paid is either fixed or variable: in life insurance the amount to be paid is always fixed and stated in the insurance policy, but in most other forms of insurance the intention is that the insurance compensate the policyholder for the losses he might incur as a consequence of the events covered by his policy.