No Arabic abstract
Life insurance cash flows become reserve dependent when contract conditions are modified during the contract term on condition that actuarial equivalence is maintained. As a result, insurance cash flows and prospective reserves depend on each other in a circular way, and it is a non-trivial problem to solve that circularity and make cash flows and prospective reserves well-defined. In Markovian models, the (stochastic) Thiele equation and the Cantelli Theorem are the standard tools for solving the circularity issue and for maintaining actuarial equivalence. This paper expands the stochastic Thiele equation and the Cantelli Theorem to non-Markovian frameworks and presents a recursive scheme for the calculation of multiple contract modifications.
Bernard et al. (2015) study an optimal insurance design problem where an individuals preference is of the rank-dependent utility (RDU) type, and show that in general an optimal contract covers both large and small losses. However, their contracts suffer from a problem of moral hazard for paying more compensation for a smaller loss. This paper addresses this setback by exogenously imposing the constraint that both the indemnity function and the insureds retention function be increasing with respect to the loss. We characterize the optimal solutions via calculus of variations, and then apply the result to obtain explicitly expressed contracts for problems with Yaaris dual criterion and general RDU. Finally, we use a numerical example to compare the results between ours and that of Bernard et al. (2015).
We undertake an empirical analysis for the premium data of non-life insurance companies operating in India, in the paradigm of fitting the data for the parametric distribution of Lognormal and the extreme value based distributions of Generalized Extreme Value and Generalized Pareto. The best fit to the data for ten companies considered, is obtained for the Generalized Extreme Value distribution.
In this paper we propose a multi-state model for the evaluation of the conversion option contract. The multi-state model is based on age-indexed semi-Markov chains that are able to reproduce many important aspects that influence the valuation of the option such as the duration problem, the time non-homogeneity and the ageing effect. The value of the conversion option is evaluated after the formal description of this contract.
This paper investigates Pareto optimal (PO, for short) insurance contracts in a behavioral finance framework, in which the insured evaluates contracts by the rank-dependent utility (RDU) theory and the insurer by the expected value premium principle. The incentive compatibility constraint is taken into account, so the contracts are free of moral hazard. The problem is initially formulated as a non-concave maximization problem involving Choquet expectation, then turned into a quantile optimization problem and tackled by calculus of variations method. The optimal contracts are expressed by a double-obstacle ordinary differential equation for a semi-linear second-order elliptic operator with nonlocal boundary conditions. We provide a simple numerical scheme as well as a numerical example to calculate the optimal contracts. Let $theta$ and $m_0$ denote the relative safety loading and the mass of the potential loss at 0. We find that every moral-hazard-free contract is optimal for infinitely many RDU insureds if $0<theta<frac{m_0}{1-m_0}$; by contrast, some contracts such as the full coverage contract are never optimal for any RDU insured if $theta>frac{m_0}{1-m_0}$. We also derive all the PO contracts when either the compensations or the retentions loss monotonicity.
In this article we solve the problem of maximizing the expected utility of future consumption and terminal wealth to determine the optimal pension or life-cycle fund strategy for a cohort of pension fund investors. The setup is strongly related to a DC pension plan where additionally (individual) consumption is taken into account. The consumption rate is subject to a time-varying minimum level and terminal wealth is subject to a terminal floor. Moreover, the preference between consumption and terminal wealth as well as the intertemporal coefficient of risk aversion are time-varying and therefore depend on the age of the considered pension cohort. The optimal consumption and investment policies are calculated in the case of a Black-Scholes financial market framework and hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) utility functions. We generalize Ye (2008) (2008 American Control Conference, 356-362) by adding an age-dependent coefficient of risk aversion and extend Steffensen (2011) (Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 35(5), 659-667), Hentschel (2016) (Doctoral dissertation, Ulm University) and Aase (2017) (Stochastics, 89(1), 115-141) by considering consumption in combination with terminal wealth and allowing for consumption and terminal wealth floors via an application of HARA utility functions. A case study on fitting several models to realistic, time-dependent life-cycle consumption and relative investment profiles shows that only our extended model with time-varying preference parameters provides sufficient flexibility for an adequate fit. This is of particular interest to life-cycle products for (private) pension investments or pension insurance in general.