The purpose of this paper is to reveal the relation between the reversibility of annuities and retirees' reluctance to annuitize. To this end, we assume the existence of reversible annuities, whose surrender charge is a proportion of their purchase value. We model a retiree as a...

In many settings, behavioral economists have documented a price reference effect: the fact that a consumer's willingness to pay for a good is affected by difference between the observed price and the reference price they rationally expect. In this paper, we show that such preferences interact...

This paper highlights a previously-unnoticed property of commonly-used discrete choice models, which is that they feature parallel demand curves. Specifically, we show that in random utility models, inverse aggregate demand curves shift in parallel with respect to variety if and only if the...

In recent years, a market for mortality derivatives began developing as a way to handle systematic mortality risk, which is inherent in life insurance and annuity contracts. Systematic mortality risk is due to the uncertain development of future mortality intensities, or {\it hazard rates}. In...