An examination of the efficiency of the marketing distribution channel and organizational structure for insurance companies is presented from a framework that views the insurer as a financial intermediary rather than as a "production entity" which produces "value added" through loss payments....

This study examines the effect of the statistical/mathematical model selected and the variable set considered on the ability to identify financially troubled life insurers. Models considered are two artificial neural network methods (back-propagation and learning vector quantization (LVQ)) and...

The profits of many businesses are strongly affected by weather related events, and insurance against weather related risks (acts of God) has been a traditional domain for transfer of (certain) of these risks. Recent innovations in the capital market have now provided financial instruments to...

This paper presents a class of utility functions (class A_\infty) that contains all of the utility functions commonly used for mathematical modeling: the class consisting of those utility functions whose derivatives alternate in sign. A simple representation via mixtures of exponential utilities...