In a bonus-malus system in car insurance, the bonus class of a customer is updated from one year to the next as a function of the current class and the number of claims in the year (assumed Poisson). Thus the sequence of classes of a customer in consecutive years forms a Markov chain, and most...

In this paper, we review pricing of the variable annuity living and death guarantees offered to retail investors in many countries. Investors purchase these products to take advantage of market growth and protect savings. We present pricing of these products via an optimal stochastic control...

We study risk-minimization for a large class of insurance contracts. Given that the individual progress in time of visiting an insurance policy's states follows an F-doubly stochastic Markov chain, we describe different state-dependent types of insurance benefits. These cover single payments at...

We investigate a portfolio optimization problem under the threat of a market crash, where the interest rate of the bond is modeled as a Vasicek process, which is correlated with the stock price process. We adopt a non-probabilistic worst-case approach for the height and time of the market crash....

A spectrum of upper bounds (Qα(X ; p) ae[0,∞] on the (largest) (1-p)-quantile Q(X;p) of an arbitrary random variable X is introduced and shown to be stable and monotonic in α, p, and X , with Q0(X ;p) = Q(X;p). If p is small enough and the distribution of X is regular enough, then Qα(X ; p)...

The hidden Markov model (HMM) is typically used to predict the hidden regimes of observation data. Therefore, this model finds applications in many different areas, such as speech recognition systems, computational molecular biology and financial market predictions. In this paper, we use HMM for...

This paper studies the effect of variance swap in hedging volatility risk under the mean-variance criterion. We consider two mean-variance portfolio selection problems under Heston's stochastic volatility model. In the first problem, the financial market is complete and contains three primitive...

The literature on capital allocation is biased towards an asset modeling framework rather than an actuarial framework. The asset modeling framework leads to the proliferation of inappropriate assumptions about the effect of insurance line of business growth on aggregate loss distributions. This...

Optimal dividend payment under a ruin constraint is a two objective control problem which-in simple models-can be solved numerically by three essentially different methods. One is based on a modified Bellman equation and the policy improvement method (see Hipp (2003)). In this paper we use...

This paper investigates the optimal investment strategy for a defined contribution (DC) pension plan during the decumulation phase which is risk-averse and pays close attention to inflation risk. The plan aims to maximize the expected constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility from the...