The paper provides novel insights on the effect of a firm’s risk management objective on the optimal design of risk transfer instruments. I analyze the interrelation between the structure of the optimal insurance contract and the firm’s objective to minimize the required equity it has to hold to accommodate losses in the presence of multiple risks and moral hazard. In contrast to the case of ri...

Affective decision-making is a strategic model of choice under risk and uncertainty where we posit two cognitive processes — the "rational" and the "emotional" process. Observed choice is the result of equilibirum in this intrapersonal game. As an example, we present applications of affective decision-making in insurance markets, where the risk perceptions of consumers are endogenous. We then d...

In this paper we investigate the effect of internationalization on home market performance using survey data and financial statement data of German insurance groups with property-liability business for the years 1999 through 2009. We develop a resource-based perspective and argue that strategic transformation is a major factor driving insurance groups’ internationalization, whereby successful i...

Disclosure of private medical information allows insurance companies to better predict medical expenditures. The premiums the companies charge the insured employees reflect these expenditures. This paper studies incentives of employees to disclose their medical information. I find that healthier employees prefer to disclose medical information that results in a disclosure plan having a lower pr...

Standard economic theory assumes individuals make decisions over a set of risky domains according to their own risk preferences which are stable across these decision contexts. The validity of this assumption of context-invariant risk preference has led to debate in the literature. We exploit latent class analysis to identify conditional on predicted and realized risk how heterogeneity in risk ...

This chapter focuses on institutional investors in the German financial markets. Institutional investors are specialized financial intermediaries who collect and manage funds on behalf of small investors toward specific objectives in terms of risk, return and maturity. The major types of institutional investors in Germany are insurance companies and investment funds. We will examine the nature ...

We consider lifetime health insurance contracts in which ageing provisions are used to smooth the premium profile. The capital stock accumulated for each individual can be decomposed into two parts: a premium insurance and an annuitised life insurance, only the latter being transferable between insurers without triggering premium changes through risk segmentation. In a simulation based on Germa...

This paper examines the recent experience with insurance and other risk-financing instruments in developing countries in order to gain insights into the effectiveness of these instruments in reducing economic insecurity. Insurance and other risk financing strategies are viewed as efforts to recover from negative income shocks through risk pooling and transfer. Specific examples of public-privat...

The most natural way of ordering portfolios is by comparing their payoffs. A portfolio with payoff higher than the payoff of another portfolio is greater in the sense of portfolio dominance than that other portfolio. Portfolio dominance is a lattice order if the supremum and the infimum of any two portfolios are well-defined. We study security markets with infinitely many securities and arbitra...

I analyze the role of bundling risks to be covered by one multiline integrated risk management policy in the presence of moral hazard. The structure of the optimal multiline policy depends on a firm’s risk-management objective. It is shown that– subject to retaining incentives to invest in risk reduction–the firm might be able to reduce the maximum retained loss by choosing a multiline policy w...