With respect to the pricing of insurance, there is often tension between setting premiums that reflect risk and dealing with equity/affordability issues. The National Flood Insurance Program in the United States has recently shifted toward elimination of certain premium discounts which has...

This paper describes the challenges consumers, insurers and insurance regulators face in dealing with insurance for low-probability high-consequence events. Given their limited experience with catastrophes, there is a tendency for all three parties to engage in short-term intuitive thinking...

We examine the flood insurance decisions of over 100,000 households, using standard expected utility models and rank dependent utility models that incorporate probability distortions. Consumers' insurance choices provide important insights into their risk attitudes. Previous research has...

This paper tests some existing theories developed over the past 25 years on corporate demand for insurance. Using a unique dataset of 1,809 large U.S. corporations it provides the first empirical analysis that compares corporate demand for standard property insurance and for catastrophe coverage...

Testing whether risk professionals (here insurers) behave differently under risk and ambiguity when they cover catastrophic risks (floods and earthquakes) and non-catastrophic risks (fires), this paper reports the results of the first field experiment in the United States designed to distinguish...

Motivated by the results of the field experiment in the United Sates to distinguish two sources of ambiguity and its relation with the robust learning theory, we propose an insurance pricing formula to accommodate the ambiguity types in the robust learning framework. Based on the field...

The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as Harvey Leibensteins's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differences, and show that tipping of equilibria,...

The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as (Harvey) Leibenstein's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differences, and show that tipping of equilibria,...

Community resilience has become an important concern due to the increasing scale and frequency of natural and technological disasters. Although several frameworks have been introduced to measure resilience, there has been no systematic process that captures all the key sectors of a community....