An examination of the efficiency of the marketing distribution channel and organizational structure for insurance companies is presented from a framework that views the insurer as a financial intermediary rather than as a "production entity" which produces "value added" through loss payments....

This study examines the effect of the statistical/mathematical model selected and the variable set considered on the ability to identify financially troubled life insurers. Models considered are two artificial neural network methods (back-propagation and learning vector quantization (LVQ)) and...

The most important new development in the past two decades in the personal lines of insurance may well be the use of an individual's credit history as a classification and rating variable to predict losses. However, in spite of its obvious success as an underwriting tool, and the clear actuarial...

Customer-side influences on insurance have been relatively ignored in the literature. Using the household as the unit of analysis, this article focuses on the behavior of households having multiple policies of different types with the same insurance company, and who cancel their first policy....

Current debates in the insurance and public policy literatures over health care financing and cost control measures continue to focus on managed care and HMOs. The lower utilization rates found in HMOs (compared to traditional fee-for-service indemnity plans) have generally been attributed to...