We examine insurance markets with two types of customers: those who regret suboptimal decisions and those who don.t. In this setting, we characterize the equilibria under hidden information about the type of customers and hidden action. We show that both pooling and separating equilibria can...

This paper seeks to determine whether governments should intervene in the private annuity market by directly providing public insurance in the form of annuities when both the government and the insurance companies could default. It is found that, although the government could default,...

Kaplow (1992b) shows that governments should not provide a tax deduction for net losses when a private insurance contract is available. However, his findings rest on the assumption that the private insurance is proportional coverage. We find that Kaplow's conclusions may not hold when the...

Using the representative agent approach as in Kaplow (Am Econ Rev 82:1013–1017, 1992b), this paper shows that providing tax deductions for the individual's net losses is socially optimal when the insurer faces the risk of insolvency. We further show that the government should adopt a higher...