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Author: Vitor Farinha Luz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Information theory in economics
Languages : en
Pages : 54
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Book Description
This paper studies a competitive model of insurance markets in which consumers are privately informed about their risk and risk preferences. We provide a tractable characterization of equilibria, which depend non-trivially on consumers' type distribution, a desirable feature for policy analysis. The use of consumer characteristics for risk classification is modeled as the disclosure of a public informative signal. A novel monotonicity property of signals is shown to be necessary and sufficient for their release to be welfare improving for almost all consumer types. We also study the effect of changes to the risk distribution in the population as the result of demographic changes or policy interventions. When considering the monotone likelihood ratio ordering of distributions, an increase in the risk distribution leads to lower utility for almost all consumer types. In contrast, the effect is ambiguous when considering the first order stochastic dominance ordering.
Author: Vitor Farinha Luz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Information theory in economics
Languages : en
Pages : 54
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Book Description
This paper studies a competitive model of insurance markets in which consumers are privately informed about their risk and risk preferences. We provide a tractable characterization of equilibria, which depend non-trivially on consumers' type distribution, a desirable feature for policy analysis. The use of consumer characteristics for risk classification is modeled as the disclosure of a public informative signal. A novel monotonicity property of signals is shown to be necessary and sufficient for their release to be welfare improving for almost all consumer types. We also study the effect of changes to the risk distribution in the population as the result of demographic changes or policy interventions. When considering the monotone likelihood ratio ordering of distributions, an increase in the risk distribution leads to lower utility for almost all consumer types. In contrast, the effect is ambiguous when considering the first order stochastic dominance ordering.
Author: David M. Cutler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Insurance
Languages : en
Pages : 19
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Book Description
Standard theories of insurance, dating from Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), stress the role of adverse selection in explaining the decision to purchase insurance. In these models, higher risk people buy full or near-full insurance, while lower risk people buy less complete coverage, if they buy at all. While this prediction appears to hold in some real world insurance markets, in many others, it is the lower risk individuals who have more insurance coverage. If the standard model is extended to allow individuals to vary in their risk tolerance as well as their risk type, this could explain why the relationship between insurance coverage and risk occurrence can be of any sign, even if the standard asymmetric information effects also exist. We present empirical evidence in five difference insurance markets in the United States that is consistent with this potential role for risk tolerance. Specifically, we show that individuals who engage in risky behavior or who do not engage in risk reducing behavior are systematically less likely to hold life insurance, acute private health insurance, annuities, long-term care insurance, and Medigap. Moreover, we show that the sign of this preference effect differs across markets, tending to induce lower risk individuals to purchase insurance in some of these markets, but higher risk individuals to purchase insurance in others. These findings suggest that preference heterogeneity may be important in explaining the differential patterns of insurance coverage in various insurance markets.
Author: David M. Cutler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 20
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Book Description
Standard theories of insurance, dating from Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), stress the role of adverse selection in explaining the decision to purchase insurance. In these models, higher risk people buy full or near-full insurance, while lower risk people buy less complete coverage, if they buy at all. While this prediction appears to hold in some real world insurance markets, in many others, it is the lower risk individuals who have more insurance coverage. If the standard model is extended to allow individuals to vary in their risk tolerance as well as their risk type, this could explain why the relationship between insurance coverage and risk occurrence can be of any sign, even if the standard asymmetric information effects also exist. We present empirical evidence in five difference insurance markets in the United States that is consistent with this potential role for risk tolerance. Specifically, we show that individuals who engage in risky behavior or who do not engage in risk reducing behavior are systematically less likely to hold life insurance, acute private health insurance, annuities, long-term care insurance, and Medigap. Moreover, we show that the sign of this preference effect differs across markets, tending to induce lower risk individuals to purchase insurance in some of these markets, but higher risk individuals to purchase insurance in others. These findings suggest that preference heterogeneity may be important in explaining the differential patterns of insurance coverage in various insurance markets.
Author: Hanming Fang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Adverse selection (Insurance)
Languages : en
Pages : 50
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Book Description
Abstract: A large empirical literature found that the correlation between insurance purchase and ex post realization of risk is often statistically insignificant or negative. This is inconsistent with the predictions from the classic models of insurance a la Akerlof (1970), Pauly (1974) and Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) where consumers have one-dimensional heterogeneity in their risk types. It is suggested that selection based on multidimensional private information, e.g., risk and risk preference types, may be able to explain the empirical findings. In this paper, we systematically investigate whether selection based on multidimensional private information in risk and risk preferences, can, under different market structures, result in a negative correlation in equilibrium between insurance coverage and ex post realization of risk. We show that if the insurance market is perfectly competitive, selection based on multidimensional private information does not result in negative correlation property in equilibrium, unless there is a sufficiently high loading factor. If the insurance market is monopolistic or imperfectly competitive, however, we show that it is possible to generate negative correlation property in equilibrium when risk and risk preference types are sufficiently negative dependent, a notion we formalize using the concept of copula. We also clarify the connections between some of the important concepts such as adverse/advantageous selection and positive/negative correlation property
Author: Analysis and Inference, Inc
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Amy Finkelstein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Adverse selection (Insurance)
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
This paper proposes a new test for adverse selection in insurance markets based on observable characteristics of insurance buyers that are not used in setting insurance prices. The test rejects the null hypothesis of symmetric information when it is possible to find one or more such "unused observables" that are correlated both with the claims experience of the insured and with the quantity of insurance purchased. Unlike previous tests for asymmetric information, this test is not confounded by heterogeneity in individual preference parameters, such as risk aversion, that affect insurance demand. Moreover, it can potentially identify the presence of adverse selection, while most alternative tests cannot distinguish adverse selection from moral hazard. We apply this test to a new data set on annuity purchases in the United Kingdom, focusing on the annuitant's place of residence as an "unused observable." We show that the socio-economic status of the annuitant's place of residence is correlated both with annuity purchases and with the annuitant's prospective mortality. Annuity buyers in different communities therefore face different effective insurance prices, and they make different choices accordingly. This is consistent with the presence of adverse selection. Our findings also raise questions about how insurance companies select the set of buyer attributes that they use in setting policy prices. We suggest that political economy concerns may figure prominently in decisions to forego the use of some information that could improve the risk classification of insurance buyers.
Author: Johannes Spinnewijn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Demand (Economic theory)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Recent empirical work finds that surprisingly little variation in the demand for insurance is explained by heterogeneity in risks. I distinguish between heterogeneity in risk preferences and risk perceptions underlying the unexplained variation. Heterogeneous risk perceptions induce a systematic difference between the revealed and actual value of insurance as a function of the insurance price. Using a sufficient statistics approach that accounts for this alternative source of heterogeneity, I find that the welfare conclusions regarding adversely selected markets are substantially different. The source of heterogeneity is also essential for the evaluation of different interventions intended to correct inefficiencies due to adverse selection like insurance subsidies and mandates, risk-adjusted pricing and information policies.
Author: Tyler Abbot
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
In this paper I build a continuous time model of a complete financial market with $N$ heterogeneous agents whose constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) preferences differ in their level of risk aversion. I find that preference heterogeneity is able to replicate a high market price of risk and a low risk-free rate by separating the markets for risky and risk free assets. This provides an explanation for the equity risk premium and risk-free rate puzzles, while avoiding a preference for early resolution of uncertainty inherent in non-seperable preferences, i.e. Epstein-Zin preferences. Additionally, I find that changing the number of preference types has a non-trivial effect on the solution. Finally, I show through a numerical example that the model predicts several phenomena observed in financial data, namely a correlation between dividend yields and the stochastic discount factor, a non-linear response of volatility to shocks, and both pro- and counter-cyclical leverage cycles depending on the assumptions about the distribution of preferences.
Author: Michael Geruso
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Adverse selection (Insurance)
Languages : en
Pages : 60
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Book Description
In many markets insurers are barred from price discrimination on consumer characteristics like age, gender, and medical history. By themselves, such restrictions are known to exacerbate adverse selection problems. But the conventional wisdom -- widely reflected in policy -- is that with regulatory tools like premium subsidies, it is possible to address selection and induce efficient plan choices without price-discriminating. In this paper, I show why this conventional wisdom is wrong: As long as different sets of consumers (men and women, rich and poor, young and old) differ in their willingness-to-pay for insurance conditional on the losses they generate, then price discrimination across such groups is welfare-improving. The conventional wisdom is wrong because it implicitly assumes a one-to-one mapping from insurable risk to insurance valuation. I show that demand heterogeneity that breaks this one-to-one relationship is empirically relevant in a consumer health plan setting. Younger and older consumers and men and women reveal strikingly different demand for health insurance, conditional on their objective medical spending risk. This implies that these groups must face different prices in order to sort themselves efficiently across insurance contracts. The theoretical and empirical analysis highlights a previously unexplored, but fundamental, tradeoff between equity and efficiency that is unique to selection markets.
Author: Guy Thomas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110710033X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
A novel book that argues that, contrary to received wisdom, some adverse selection in insurance markets is beneficial to society as a whole. It is for all those interested in public policy arguments about insurance and discrimination: policymakers, academics, actuaries, underwriters, disability activists, geneticists and other medical professionals.
