Pricing life insurance under stochastic mortality via the instantaneous Sharpe ratio, working paper

We develop a pricing rule for life insurance under stochastic mortality in an incomplete market by assuming that the insurance company requires compensation for its risk in the form of a pre-specified instantaneous Sharpe ratio. Our valuation formula satisfies a number of desirable properties, many of which it shares with the standard deviation premium principle. The major result of the paper is that the price per contract solves a linear partial differential equation as the number of contracts approaches infinity. One can interpret the limiting price as an expectation with respect to an equivalent martin-gale measure. Another important result is that if the hazard rate is stochastic, then the risk-adjusted premium is greater than the net premium, even as the number of contracts approaches infinity. We present a numerical example to illustrate our results, along with the corresponding algorithms.