The paper focuses on the signaling value of a tax when agents are less informed than the government on the effect of their consumption. The policy making process is analyzed as a game in which the government wants to influence consumers' behaviors through tax policy, consumers being rational and...

The standard literature on the value of life relies on Yaari’s (1965) model, which includes an implicit assumption of risk neutrality with respect to life duration. To overpass this limitation, we extend the theory to a simple variety of nonadditively separable preferences. The enlargement we...

This article deals with optimal insurance contracts in the framework of imprecise probabilities and adverse selection. Agents differ not only in the objective risk they face but also in the perception of risk. In monopoly, a range of configurations that VNM preferences preclude appears: a...

The present paper thoroughly explores second-best efficient allocations in an insurance economy with adverse selection. We start with a natural extension of the classical model, assuming less than perfect risk perception. We characterize the constraints on efficient redistribution, and we...

We study imperfect competition between insurers in a multiple-risk environment. In the absence of asymmetric information, equilibria are efficient, and we determine the degrees of specialization under which the specialized insurers are able or unable to capture the surplus. We show in contrast...

We analyze markets where insurers are better informed about risk than consumers. We show that even competitive markets may result in insufficient information revelation and inefficient insurance coverage. This explains why certain risky consumers remain uninsured and why certain market segments...

This survey reviews the micro-economic foundations of the analysis of life insurance markets. The first part outlines a simple theory of insurance needs based on the life-cycle hypothesis. The second part builds on contract theory to expose the main issues in life insurance design within a...

Informed insurance monopoly and risk discrimination We model a situation where a monopolistic insurer is better at evaluating riski­ness than the policyholders. We characterize the equilibria of the corresponding multidimensional signaling game. We compare the predictions with those of adverse...

This article models a situation in which a monopolistic insurer evaluates risk better than its customers. The resulting equilibrium allocations are compared to the consequences of the standard adverse selection hypothesis. On the positive side, they exhibit the property that low-risk people are...