Human behavior, rational or irrational one, influences one of the most complex markets worldwide: the insurance market. In most situations, insurance markets are not competitive and risk neutral insurers negotiate under asymmetric information with actors who exhibit risk aversion. In this paper...

Insurance for natural hazards - earthquakes, hurricanes, or pandemics - is rarely comprehensively adopted without intense government intervention, and even then it is often only a minority of properties or businesses that are insured. Efforts to close this insurance gap include the introduction...

A simple formula for non-discriminatory insurance pricing is introduced. This formula is based on the assumption that certain individual (discriminatory) policyholder information is not allowed to be used for insurance pricing. The suggested procedure can be summarized as follows: First, we...

Kenneth Arrow and Karl Borch published several important articles in the early 1960s that can be viewed as the beginning of modern economic analysis of insurance activity. This chapter reviews the main theoretical and empirical contributions in insurance economics since that time. The review...

In this article, we establish a model of competitive insurance markets based on Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) where insurers can perform risk classification tests either before insurance contracts are issued (underwriting) or when coverage claims are filed (post-loss test). However, insurers...

We establish a powerful method to solve the life-cycle consumption choice problem of an individual facing biometric risks that are uninsurable. Problems of this type are notoriously hard to solve and closed-form solutions are unknown. The solution is obtained by optimizing over a parametrized...

Insurance markets often feature consumer sorting along both an extensive margin (whether to buy) and an intensive margin (which plan to buy). We present a new graphical theoretical framework that extends a workhorse model to incorporate both selection margins simultaneously. A key insight from...

The severe hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 and the resulting losses are prompting insurers to reassess their risk and business strategies in Southeastern states. This article examines recent trends in the affected homeowners insurance markets and discusses how these markets are likely to...

One of the most significant economic developments of the past decade has been the development of innovative risk-financing techniques in the insurance industry. Innovation has been driven by the increase in the frequency and severity of catastrophic losses, capital management needs in the life...

In this paper, we propose a model for the optimal premium pricing policy of an insurance company into a competitive environment using Dynamic Programming into a stochastic, discrete-time framework when the company is expected to lose part of the market. In our approach, the volume of business...