效用决策、财政补贴及我国农业保险的最优保险模型研究

应用期望效用决策模型对我国农业保险的最优保险问题进行了研究,建立了实现农业保险博弈双方公平的均衡免赔率函数,以及政府通过财政进行保费补贴条件下的修正均衡免赔率函数。研究表明,提高农户和保险公司的风险识别能力、建立全国统一的政策性农业保险公司以及加大财政补贴的投入力度有助于提高农户的投保意愿,对促进我国农业保险的快速发展具有积极意义。     

重疾“年轻化”保险早规划

刘芳芳，30岁，厦门市某外企高级职员，年薪15万。2002年5月，在保险公司投保了重大疾病保险，年缴保费11300元。     

保险门店：要过三道关

众所周知，保险公司的保费收入主要靠银行、邮政、保险代理人等中介渠道，但这些渠道为保险公司带来保费收入的同时也埋下不少“隐患”，例如，保险公司远离客户、远离市场、远离风险管控点、利润下降等。     

企业财产投保应注意的法律问题

企业财产投保是企业分散财产风险的一种重要经营活动，为使企业财产投保中规范、合法、正确履行必要的保险法律义务，以使财产保险合同有效，确保保险公司顺利理赔，企业在财产投保中应注意以下法律问题。     

保险保障基金对保险企业形式的影响

文章运用期权理论,通过对比保险保障基金设立前后不同组织形式的股东价值变化,得出：按照各保险公司保费规模的一定比例提取的保险保障基金,能够通过影响保险公司组织形式而为股东带来收益。与一家保险公司经营多种风险比较,采取集团化的组织形式,针对每一类风险,在集团旗下建立专业保险公司,可以使股东利益最大化。而且,保险消费者风险的差异性越大,为股东带来的价值越高。文章结论既为保险集团综合化、专业化经营提供了理论基础,也为保险保障基金由保费规模的一定比例提取改为按风险保费收取提供了理论支持。     

一诺千金，慈石招铁

最近中国保监会主席吴定富在保险社团调研时指出：“要下大力气保护保险消费者利益,同时加强行业自律体系建设,规范会员公司经营行为。”如何做到这一点？归根到底还是“诚信”二字。保险公司是经营风险的企业。人们将风险通过购买保险的方式,转嫁给保险公司。如果投保人对于向哪家保险公司投保保险,转嫁风险本身都成为一种风险的话,那就值得保险业的深思了。     

中国保险资金运用风险分析

我国的保险业发展正处于初级阶段,但随着这几年来我国国民经济的发展,保险公司的保费收入大幅度提高,保险公司积累了很多闲置的资金,保险公司对这部分资金进行投资运作。而我国在保险投资时面临很多风险,如何利用好保险资金,处理好风险与收益的关系,成为保险公司的当务之急。     

艺术品保险：一块无人敢吃的蛋糕

据文化部的统计。2010年中国艺术品市场的交易总额达到1694亿元，如果按照1％的费率、50％的艺术品投保计算，保险公司一年可从中赚取的保费高达8．47亿元。不过。直到近期，中国人保宣布，作为国内首款艺术品专属保险，在推出半年后。终于获得首个签单。为什么没人敢吃这块大蛋糕？藏家无意识买保险、机构无钱买保险、保险公司无丰...     

企业财产投保应注意的法律问题

<正> 企业财产投保是企业分散财产风险的一种重要经营活动,为使企业财产投保中规范、合法、正确履行必要的保险法律义务,以使财产保险合同有效,确保保险公司顺利理赔,企业在财产投保中应注意以下法律问题。如实告之义务保险合同是一种最大的诚信合同,它要求投保方如实地将投保财产的情况告之保险方。因为保险方只有在全面     

具有奖励机制与再保险安排的最优保险合约设计

在保险合约中引入奖励机制可以使投保人动态参与到保险合约中,赋予了投保人在面对索赔事件时是否执行索赔的可选择权,改变了传统保险合约中投保人执行索赔的单一权利,但却增加了保险人潜在的流动性风险。保险合约中再保险的安排则可以对冲由于奖励机制产生的潜在流动性风险,进一步分散保险人的风险,有助于保险人稳健经营。基于此,通过建立具有红利奖励机制与再保险安排的最优保险合约设计模型,最终求解得到最优保险合约是具有最优免赔额形式的保险合约。利用算例研究方法进行建模,研究结果显示,最优保险合约中的最优免赔额与奖励机制中的红利奖励之间具有正向关系,保费、自留额与最优免赔额之间则存在着显著的负向关系。     

Optimal investment and reinsurance policies for an insurer with ambiguity aversion

In this paper, we study the optimal investment and reinsurance problem for an insurer based on the variance premium principle, in which three cases are considered. First, we assume that the financial market does not exist. The insurer only holds an insurance business, and the optimal reinsurance problem is studied. Subsequently, we assume that there exists a financial market with an accurately modeled risky asset. The optimal investment and reinsurance problem is investigated under these conditions. Finally, we consider the general case in which the insurer is concerned about the model ambiguity of both the insurance market and the financial market. In all three cases, the value function is set to maximize the expected utility of terminal wealth. By employing the dynamic programming principle, we derive the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equations, which are satisfied by the value functions and obtain closed-form solutions for optimal reinsurance and investment policies and the value functions in all three cases. Most interestingly, we elucidate how investment improves the insurer’s utility and find that the existence of ambiguity can significantly affect the optimal policies and value functions. We also compare the ambiguities in the two markets and find that ambiguity in the insurance market has much more significant impact on the value function than the ambiguity in the financial market. It implies that it is more valuable for insurer to precisely evaluate the insurance risk. We also provide some numerical examples and economic explanations to illustrate our results.     

Are generalized call-spreads efficient?

In order to explain coexistence of a deductible for low values of the loss and an upper limit for high values of the loss in insurance contracts, we consider the exchange of risk between two rank dependent expected utility maximizers. It is shown that if the insurer (insured) takes more into account the lowest outcomes – hence maximal losses – than the insured (insurer), then the optimal contract has an upper limit (includes a deductible for high values of the loss). If furthermore, the insured (insurer) neglects the highest outcomes while the insurer (insured) does not, the optimal contract includes a deductible (full insurance) for low values of the loss.     

Equilibrium mean–variance reinsurance and investment strategies for a general insurance company under smooth ambiguity

This work investigates the equilibrium investment and reinsurance strategies for a general insurance company under smooth ambiguity. The general insurance company holds shares of an insurance company and a reinsurance company. The claims of the insurer follow a compound Poisson process. The insurer can divide part of the insurance risk to the reinsurer. Besides, the insurer and reinsurer both participate in the financial market and invest in cash and stock. However, the general insurance company is ambiguous about the insurance and financial risks and is an ambiguity-averse manager (AAM). The uncertainties over the insurance and financial risks are described by second-order distributions. The AAM aims to maximize the average performance of the weighted sum surplus process of the insurer and reinsurer under the mean–variance criterion and smooth ambiguity. We present the extended Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) system for the optimization problem combining the mean–variance criterion and smooth ambiguity. In the case that the second-order distributions are Gaussian, we obtain the closed-forms of the equilibrium reinsurance and investment strategies. At the end of this work, sensitivity analyses are presented to show the economic behaviors of the AAM.     

Ambiguity on the insurer’s side: The demand for insurance

Empirical evidence suggests that ambiguity is prevalent in insurance pricing and underwriting, and that often insurers tend to exhibit more ambiguity than the insured individuals (e.g., Hogarth and Kunreuther, 1989). Motivated by these findings, we consider a problem of demand for insurance indemnity schedules, where the insurer has ambiguous beliefs about the realizations of the insurable loss, whereas the insured is an expected-utility maximizer. We show that if the ambiguous beliefs of the insurer satisfy a property of compatibility with the non-ambiguous beliefs of the insured, then optimal indemnity schedules exist and are monotonic. By virtue of monotonicity, no ex-post moral hazard issues arise at our solutions (e.g., Huberman et al., 1983). In addition, in the case where the insurer is either ambiguity-seeking or ambiguity-averse, we show that the problem of determining the optimal indemnity schedule reduces to that of solving an auxiliary problem that is simpler than the original one in that it does not involve ambiguity. Finally, under additional assumptions, we give an explicit characterization of the optimal indemnity schedule for the insured, and we show how our results naturally extend the classical result of Arrow (1971) on the optimality of the deductible indemnity schedule.     

A sharing mechanism of investment outcome for interest-sensitive life insurance products

As growing sales of insurance contracts with a saving feature, an issue of sharing investment outcome gets the attention of insurers and policyholders. This paper focuses on a systematic way of finding the sharing mechanism for an optimal contract design in such a way that a policyholder and an insurer maximize their expected utilities. We adopt the policyholder and the insurer as a principal and an agent, respectively, and regard a share of the investment performance as an incentive for the insurer to elicit efforts. As a result of this setting, the moral hazard issue generated from the insurer is unavoidable. For the purpose, the Holmström (1979)’s principal-agent model with limited observability of the insurer’s action plays a leading role in resolving a pie-cutting problem. Under our model assumption, the sharing mechanism states that a portion of the outcome belonging to the insurer is a nondecreasing function of the excess of the portfolio return over a benchmark return when the two parties are risk-averse. In particular, the sensitivity of the sharing portion has an S-shape curve which is consistent with the insurer’s risk propensity.An empirical study based on companies’ portfolio attributes and crediting rates verifies that our theoretical findings are consistent with statistically significant results. In particular, we confirm that the bargaining power of the insurer has a considerable impact on the sharing mechanism as it is theoretically important.     

An optimal insurance design problem under Knightian uncertainty

This paper solves an optimal insurance design problem in which both the insurer and the insured are subject to Knightian uncertainty about the loss distribution. The Knightian uncertainty is modeled in a multi-prior g-expectation framework. We obtain an endogenous characterization of the optimal indemnity that extends classical theorems of Arrow (Essays in the Theory of Risk Bearing. Markham, Chicago 1971) and Raviv (Am Econ Rev 69(1):84–96, 1979) in the classical situation. In the presence of Knightian uncertainty, it is shown that the optimal insurance contract is not only contingent on the realized loss but also on another source of uncertainty coming from the ambiguity.     

Optimal reinsurance with multiple tranches

Motivated by common practices in the reinsurance industry and in insurance markets such as Lloyd’s, we study the general problem of optimal insurance contracts design in the presence of multiple insurance providers. We show that the optimal risk allocation rule is characterized by a hierarchical structure of risk sharing where all agents take on risks only above the endogenously determined thresholds, or agent-specific deductibles. Linear risk sharing between two adjacent thresholds is shown to be optimal when all agents have CARA utilities. Furthermore, we show that the optimal thresholds can be efficiently calculated through the fixed point of a contraction mapping.     

Optimal dividend strategies with time-inconsistent preferences

This paper studies the optimal dividend strategies of an insurance company when the manager has time-inconsistent preferences. We consider the problem for a naive manager and a sophisticated manager, and analytically derive the optimal dividend strategies when claim sizes follow an exponential distribution. Our results show that the manager with time-inconsistent preferences tends to pay out dividends earlier than her time-consistent counterpart and that the sophisticated manager is more inclined to pay out dividends than the naive manager. Furthermore, we extend these results to the case with claim sizes following a mixed exponential distribution, and provide a numerical analysis to reveal the sensitivity of the optimal dividend strategies to changes in the premium, claims and surplus volatility.     

Alpha-robust mean-variance reinsurance-investment strategy

Inspired by the α-maxmin expected utility, we propose a new class of mean-variance criterion, called α-maxmin mean-variance criterion, and apply it to the reinsurance-investment problem. Our model allows the insurer to have different levels of ambiguity aversion (rather than only consider the extremely ambiguity-averse attitude as in the literature). The insurer can purchase proportional reinsurance and also invest the surplus in a financial market consisting of a risk-free asset and a risky asset, whose dynamics is correlated with the insurance surplus. Closed-form equilibrium reinsurance-investment strategy is derived by solving the extended Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation. Our results show that the equilibrium reinsurance strategy is always more conservative if the insurer is more ambiguity-averse. When the dependence between insurance and financial risks are weak, the equilibrium investment strategy is also more conservative if the insurer is more ambiguity-averse. However, in order to diversify the portfolio, a more ambiguity-averse insurer may adopt a more aggressive investment strategy if the insurance market is very ambiguous. For an ambiguity-neutral insurer, the investment strategy is identical to the non-robust investment strategy.