Innon-life insurance, the payment history can be predictive of the timing of a settlement for individual claims. Ignoring the association between the payment process and the settlement process could bias the prediction of outstanding payments. To address this issue, we introduce into the literature of micro-level loss reserving a joint modeling framework that incorporates longitudinal payments of a claim into the intensity process of claim settlement. We discuss statistical inference and focus on the prediction aspects of the model. We demonstrate applications of the proposed model in the reserving practice with a detailed empirical analysis using data from a property insurance provider. The prediction results from an out-of-sample validation show that the joint model framework outperforms existing reserving models that ignore the payment–settlement association.

1.1. In the different versions of the “Theory of Risk” it is almost universally assumed that ruin or bankruptcy marks the end of the game. The earlier versions of the theory tried to estimate the probability of this event, and studied the steps which an insurance company could take to bring probability of ruin down to an acceptable level. The more modern versions of the theory of risk tend to formulate the problem in economic terms, and study the cost of postponing or avoiding ruin.

In a recent discussion of a paper [4] surveying the development of the theory of risk, Professor Bather suggested that ruin may not necessarily be the end. If an otherwise sound insurance company gets into difficulties, so that ruin looms large, it is very likely that steps will be taken to rescue the company, for instance by refinancing, or in more extreme cases, by a merger.

1.2. To practical insurance men the simple suggestion of Professor Bather may seem next to trivial. Insurance companies get into difficulties fairly regularly, and rescue operations are considered in the insurance world, if not daily, at least annualy. The suggestion has, however, far-reaching implications for the theory of risk, and these do not seem to have been fully realised. If ruin does not mean the end of the game, but only the necessity of raising additional money, the current theories of risk may have to be radically revised. In this paper we shall discuss some of these implications.

This article discusses risk classification and develops and discusses a framework for estimating the effects of restrictions on risk classification. It is shown that expected losses due to adverse selection depend only on means, variances and covariances of insurance factors and rates of uptake of insurance. Percentage loadings required to avoid losses are displayed. Correlated information, such as family history, is also incorporated and it is seen how such information limits losses and decreases required loadings. Although the evidence suggests that adverse selection is not, at present, a severe problem for insurers, this might change if the authorities impose restrictions on risk classification and/or customers gain an informational advantage (such as better knowledge of their own risk levels). Application is made to unisex annuity pricing in the UK insurance market.

More than ten years ago I wrote a paper with the title “The Economic Theory of Insurance” [6]. I was not particularly happy about this paper, and I do not think it contributed much to the development of a sastifactory theory. The paper did however make me—and I hope some readers—acutely aware of the difficulties and problems which must be overcome before a proper theory can be constructed. These problems are still unsolved, so I have on the present occassion chosen a more modest title for a paper on substantially the same subject.

Insurance is an economic activity of some importance, and there is an obvious need for a theory to explain and analyse the activity in the insurance sector of the economy. During the last decade many economists seem to have felt the need, and to have taken it as a challenge. The results have been a fair amount of research, and a number of publications, which I shall not try to review here. It may however be useful to refer to three very recent survey articles by Farny [10], Ferry [11] and Rosa [14], which give extensive bibliographies. The three articles seem to indicate that the economics of insurance is becoming a fashionable subject of research.

We propose inference tools to analyse the concordance (or correlation) order of random vectors. The analysis in the bivariate case relies on tests for upper and lower quadrant dominance of the true distribution by a parametric or semiparametric model, i.e. for a parametric or semiparametric model to give a probability that two variables are simultaneously small or large at least as great as it would be were they left unspecified. Tests for its generalisation in higher dimensions, namely joint lower and upper orthant dominance, are also analysed. The parametric and semiparametric settings are based on the copula representation for multivariate distribution, which allows for disentangling behaviour of margins and dependence structure. A distance test and an intersection-union test for inequality constraints are developed depending on the definition of null and alternative hypotheses. An empirical illustration is given for US insurance claim data.

Let us consider the following problem.

A motorist has decided to effect an accident insurance under the following conditions. The insurance runs for one year. The premium for the first year amounts E0. If no damages have been claimed during i successive years, i = 1, 2 or 3 the premium is reduced to Ei. After four years of damagefree driving no further premium reduction is granted, so the premium remains E3. The premium is due on the first day of the year. The own risk amounts a0.

The number of accidents of our motorist during a time period T is assumed to be Poisson distributed with parameter λT. The extent of the damage has distribution function F(s) with finite mean and variance.

The problem of our motorist will be to decide whether to claim a damage or not. He will have to develop a strategy that specifies his decisions in every possible situation. His strategy will be called optimal if it minimizes the expected costs in the long run.

We may expect that in view of the premium reduction, it will be unprofitable to claim damages which are not much larger than a0. Once a damage is claimed it will be profitable to claim all following damages that exceed a0 during the remaining part of the year.

Hence his decisions will also depend on the time of the year and the premium paid at the beginning of that year. So we distinguish between four types of years, for each premium one.

This paper deals with bonus systems used in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany. These systems are studied by methods given by Mr. Loimaranta). The bonus rules of Denmark and Sweden have been modified because they contradict to one of the assumptions of the theory.

It is assumed that the number of claims in a year follows the Poisson distribution with a mean λ. Further it is assumed that the value of λ is independent of time.

In each case bonus rules are given in form of transformations Tk defined in ref. 1., i.e. Tk(i) = j when a policy moves from class i to class j after k claims. The class where a new policy starts from is called the initial class. Bonus scales, the vectors B, are normed so that the premium of the initial class is 100.

For each bonus system the efficiency η of the system and the discrimination power d of the bonus rules as a function of the mean claim frequency λ have been calculated. The graphs of these functions are presented in the figures 2 to 4 respectively. In the following pages, different bonus rules are described in detail and some simple analysis based on the curves on pp. 211-214 has been made. The calculations were performed quite recently and any deeper analysis of the results has not been possible because of lack of time.

In order to be able to apply the theory of Markov chains to a bonus system we must require among others that the transition to a certain class depends only on the number of claims occurred during last period ignoring possible former claims. The Danish system has originally four bonus classes labeled from 0 to 3.

This article summarizes some main results in modern portfolio theory. First, the Markowitz approach is presented. Then the capital asset pricing model is derived and its empirical testability is discussed. Afterwards Neumann–Morgenstern utility theory is applied to the portfolio problem. Finally, it is shown how optimal risk allocation in an economy may lead to portfolio insurance.

The projection of outstanding liabilities caused by incurred losses or claims has played a fundamental role in general insurance operations. Loss reserving methods based on individual losses generally perform better than those based on aggregate losses. This study uses a parametric individual information model taking not only individual losses but also individual information such as age, gender, and so on from policies themselves into account. Based on this model, this study proposes a computation procedure for the projection of the outstanding liabilities, discusses the estimation and statistical properties of the unknown parameters, and explores the asymptotic behaviors of the resulting loss reserving as the portfolio size approaching infinity. Most importantly, this study demonstrates the benefits of individual information on loss reserving. Remarkably, the accuracy gained from individual information is much greater than that from considering individual losses. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use individual information in loss reserving in general insurance.

The probability of ruin in continuous and finite time is numerically evaluated in a classical risk process where the premium can be updated according to credibility models and therefore change from year to year. A major consideration in the development of this approach is that it should be easily applicable to large portfolios. Our method uses as a first tool the model developed by Afonso et al. (2009), which is quite flexible and allows premiums to change annually. We extend that model by introducing a credibility approach to experience rating.

We consider a portfolio of risks which satisfy the assumptions of the Bühlmann (1967, 1969) or Bühlmann and Straub (1970) credibility models. We compute finite time ruin probabilities for different scenarios and compare with those when a fixed premium is considered.

In this paper, based on the additive measure integral representation of a non-additive measure integral, it is shown that any comonotonically additive premium principle can be represented as an integral of the distorted decumulative distribution function of the insurance risk. Furthermore, a sufficient and necessary condition that a premium principle is a distortion premium principle is given.

The purpose of this paper is to show that, for the classical risk model, explicit expressions for survival probabilities in a finite time horizon can be obtained through the inversion of the double Laplace transform of the distribution of time to ruin. To do this, we consider Gerber and Shiu (1998) and a particular value for their penalty function. Although other methods to address the problem exist, we find this approach, perhaps, more direct and simple. For the analytic inversion, we have applied twice, after some algebra, the Laplace complex inversion formula.

The qualifications of the semivariance as a useful risk measure are examined and compared to those of the variance. Although on first sight the semivariance may seem more appropriate from the insured's point of view the analysis of this paper leads to a preference for the variance as a risk measure.

Kaas, Dannenburg & Goovaerts (1997) generalized Jewell’s theorem on exact credibility, from the classical Bühlmann model to the (weighted) Bühlmann-Straub model. We extend this result further to the “Bühlmann-Straub model with a priori differences” (Bühlmann & Gisler, 2005). It turns out that exact credibility holds for a class of Tweedie models, including the Poisson, gamma and compound Poisson distribution – the most important distributions for insurance applications of generalized linear models (GLMs). Our results can also be viewed as an alternative to the HGLM approach for combining credibility and GLMs, see Nelder and Verrall (1997).

In this paper, we consider the risk–return trade-off for variable annuities in a Black–Scholes setting. Our analysis is based on a novel explicit allocation of initial wealth over the payments at various horizons. We investigate the relationship between the optimal consumption problem and the design of variable annuities by deriving the optimal so-called assumed interest rate for an investor with constant relative risk aversion preferences. We investigate the utility loss due to deviations from this. Finally, we show analytically how habit-formation-type smoothing of financial market shocks over the remaining lifetime leads to smaller year-to-year volatility in pension payouts, but to increases in the longer-term volatility.

We revisit the relative retention problem originally introduced by de Finetti using concepts recently developed in risk theory and quantitative risk management. Instead of using the Variance as a risk measure we consider the Expected Shortfall (Tail-Value-at-Risk) and include capital costs and take constraints on risk capital into account. Starting from a risk-based capital allocation, the paper presents an optimization scheme for sharing risk in a multi-risk class environment. Risk sharing takes place between two portfolios and the pricing of risktransfer reflects both portfolio structures. This allows us to shed more light on the question of how optimal risk sharing is characterized in a situation where risk transfer takes place between parties employing similar risk and performance measures. Recent developments in the regulatory domain (‘risk-based supervision’) pushing for common, insurance industry-wide risk measures underline the importance of this question. The paper includes a simple non-life insurance example illustrating optimal risk transfer in terms of retentions of common reinsurance structures.

We consider estimating tail events using exponential families of importance sampling distributions. When the cannonical sufficient statistic for the exponential family mimics the tail behaviour of the underlying cumulative distribution function, we can achieve bounded relative error for estimating tail probabilities. Examples of rare event simulation from various distributions including Tukey's g&h distribution are provided.

This (mostly) expository paper describes the importance of hedging to the pricing of modern financial products and how hedging may be achieved even when the traditional Black-Scholes assumptions are absent.

We investigate the implications of a dual approach to the graduation of the force of mortality based on the modelling of the exposures as gamma random variables, as opposed to the modelling of the numbers of deaths as Poisson random variables.

Whittaker graduation is applied to the spatial smoothing of insurance data. Such data (e.g. claim frequency) form a surface over the 2-dimensional geographic domain to which they relate. Observations on this surface are subject to sampling error. They need to be smoothed spatially if a reliable estimate of the underlying surface is to be obtained.

A measure of smoothness of a surface has been defined. This has been incorporated in 2-dimensional Whittaker graduation to effect the necessary smoothing. The details of this are worked out in Section 4. The procedure is illustrated by numerical example in Section 5. The Bayesian interpretation of this form of spatial smoothing is discussed, and used to assist in the selection of the Whittaker relativity constant.