This article extends the large amount of research on double-oral auction markets to hazards that produce only losses. We report results from a series of experiments in which subjects endowed with low-probability losses can pay a premium for insurance protection. Insurers specify the price at...

This paper explores options for programs to be put in place prior to a disaster to avoid large and often poorly-managed expenditures following a catastrophe and to provide appropriate protection against the risk of those large losses which do occur. The lack of interest in insurance protection...

This paper explores how people process information on low probability-high consequence negative events and what it will take to get individuals to be sensitive to the likelihood of these types of accidents or disasters. In a set of experiments, information is presented to individuals on the...

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the common observation that people often fail to purchase insurance against low-probability high-loss events even when it is offered at favorable premiums. We hypothesize that individuals maximize expected utility but face an explicit or implicit...

We propose a guaranteed renewability (GR) insurance in which a sequence of premiums would enable insurers to break even and would be chosen by both low- and high-risk buyers, whether or not they had suffered a loss. The premium schedule would continually decline over time, as the insurer...

Do firms have adequate incentives to invest in protection against a risk whose magnitude depends on the actions of others? This paper characterizes the Nash equilibria for this type of interaction between agents, which we call the interdependent security (IDS) problem. When agents are identical,...