The aim of this editorial is to increase the acceptance of neural net modeling in the actuarial community. Neural nets may substantially improve classical actuarial models, if appropriately applied. We illustrate this on a toy example but, in fact, this should be understood as a universal concept. Assume we have a classical regression problem where the distribution of a response Y = Y(x) can be described by covariates x. A common actuarial problem is to determine the premium $\mu ({\textit{\textbf{x}}}) = {\mathbb E} [Y({\textit{\textbf{x}}})]$ as a function of the covariates x. Actuaries have developed excellent skills to solve such problems through finding appropriate regression functions x ↦ μ(x). This editorial shows how these skills can further be improved using the toolbox of neural nets.

For insurance companies in Europe, the introduction of Solvency II leads to a tightening of rules for solvency capital provision. In life insurance, this especially affects retirement products that contain a significant portion of longevity risk (e.g., conventional annuities). Insurance companies might react by price increases for those products, and, at the same time, might think of alternatives that shift longevity risk (at least partially) to policyholders. In the extreme case, this leads to so-called tontine products where the insurance company’s role is merely administrative and longevity risk is shared within a pool of policyholders. From the policyholder’s viewpoint, such products are, however, not desirable as they lead to a high uncertainty of retirement income at old ages. In this article, we alternatively suggest a so-called tonuity that combines the appealing features of tontine and conventional annuity. Until some fixed age (the switching time), a tonuity’s payoff is tontine-like, afterwards the policyholder receives a secure payment of a (deferred) annuity. A tonuity is attractive for both the retiree (who benefits from a secure income at old ages) and the insurance company (whose capital requirements are reduced compared to conventional annuities). The tonuity is a possibility to offer tailor-made retirement products: using risk capital charges linked to Solvency II, we show that retirees with very low or very high risk aversion prefer a tontine or conventional annuity, respectively. Retirees with medium risk aversion, however, prefer a tonuity. In a utility-based framework, we therefore determine the optimal tonuity characterized by the critical switching time that maximizes the policyholder’s lifetime utility.

We consider the problem of pricing modern guarantee concepts in unit-linked life insurance, where the guaranteed amount grows contingent on the performance of an investment fund that acts simultaneously as the underlying security and the replicating portfolio. Using the Martingale Method, this nonstandard pricing problem can be transformed into a fixed-point problem, whose solution requires the evaluation of conditional expectations of highly path-dependent payoffs. By adapting the least-squares Monte Carlo method for American option pricing problems, we develop a new numerical approach to approximate the value of contingent guarantees and prove its convergence. Our valuation procedure can be applied to large-scale pricing problems, for which existing methods are infeasible, and leads to significant improvements in performance.

The aging of population is perhaps the most important problem that developed countries must face in the near future. Dependency can be seen as a consequence of the process of gradual aging. In a health context, this contingency is defined as a lack of autonomy in performing basic activities of daily living that requires the care of another person or significant help. In Europe in general and in Spain in particular, this phenomena represents a problem with economic, political, social and demographic implications. The prevalence of dependency in the population, as well as its intensity and evolution over the course of a person’s life are issues of greatest importance that should be addressed. The aim of this work is the estimation of life expectancy free of dependency (LEFD) based on functional trajectories to enhance the regular estimation of health expectancy. Using information from the Spanish survey EDAD 2008, we estimate the number of years spent free of dependency for disabled people according to gender, dependency degree (moderate, severe, major) and the earlier or later onset of dependency compared to a central trend. The main findings are as follows: first, we show evidence that to estimate LEFD ignoring the information provided by the functional trajectories may lead to non-representative LEFD estimates; second, in general, dependency-free life expectancy is higher for women than for men. However, its intensity is higher in women with later onset on dependency; Third, the loss of autonomy is higher (and more abrupt) in men than in women. Finally, the diversity of patterns observed at later onset of dependency tends to a dependency extreme-pattern in both genders.

We view the retail non-life insurance decision from the perspective of the insured. We formalize different consumption–insurance problems depending on the flexibility of the insurance contract. For exponential utility and power utility we find the optimal flexible insurance decision or insurance contract. For exponential utility we also find the optimal position in standard contracts that are less flexible and therefore, for certain nonlinear pricing rules, lead to a welfare loss for the individual insuree compared to the optimal flexible insurance decision. For the exponential loss distribution, we quantify a significant welfare loss. This calls for product development in the retail insurance business.

In insurance underwriting, misrepresentation represents the type of insurance fraud when an applicant purposely makes a false statement on a risk factor that may lower his or her cost of insurance. Under the insurance ratemaking context, we propose to use the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to perform maximum likelihood estimation of the regression effects and the prevalence of misrepresentation for the misrepresentation model proposed by Xia and Gustafson [(2016) The Canadian Journal of Statistics, 44, 198–218]. For applying the EM algorithm, the unobserved status of misrepresentation is treated as a latent variable in the complete-data likelihood function. We derive the iterative formulas for the EM algorithm and obtain the analytical form of the Fisher information matrix for frequentist inference on the parameters of interest for lognormal losses. We implement the algorithm and demonstrate that valid inference can be obtained on the risk effect despite the unobserved status of misrepresentation. Applying the proposed algorithm, we perform a loss severity analysis with the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data. The analysis reveals not only the potential impact misrepresentation may have on the risk effect but also statistical evidence on the presence of misrepresentation in the self-reported insurance status.

We study the propagation of uncertainty from a class of priors introduced by Arias-Nicolás et al. [(2016) Bayesian Analysis, 11(4), 1107–1136] to the premiums (both the collective and the Bayesian), for a wide family of premium principles (specifically, those that preserve the likelihood ratio order). The class under study reflects the prior uncertainty using distortion functions and fulfills some desirable requirements: elicitation is easy, the prior uncertainty can be measured by different metrics, and the range of quantities of interest is easily obtained from the extremal members of the class. We illustrate the methodology with several examples based on different claim counts models.

This paper focuses on the distribution of Poisson sums of discounted claims over a finite or infinite time period. It gives two new results when claim amounts follow Mittag-Leffler distributions and two new results when claim amounts follow gamma distributions. Further, as Mittag-Leffler distribution is of heavy-tailed nature and its moments only exist for order strictly smaller than one, this distribution can be used for modelling insurance whose claim amounts are extremely large, that is, catastrophe insurance.

In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling claim dependence, with the assumption that the claim numbers and the aggregate claim amounts are mutually and serially dependent through an underlying hidden state and can be characterized by a hidden finite state Markov chain using bivariate Hidden Markov Model (BHMM). We construct three different BHMMs, namely Poisson–Normal HMM, Poisson–Gamma HMM, and Negative Binomial–Gamma HMM, stemming from the most commonly used distributions in insurance studies. Expectation Maximization algorithm is implemented and for the maximization of the state-dependent part of log-likelihood of BHMMs, the estimates are derived analytically. To illustrate the proposed model, motor third-party liability claims in Istanbul, Turkey, are employed in the frame of Poisson–Normal HMM under a different number of states. In addition, we derive the forecast distribution, calculate state predictions, and determine the most likely sequence of states. The results indicate that the dependence under indirect factors can be captured in terms of different states, namely low, medium, and high states.

We define and study in this work a simple model designed for managing long-term market risk of financial institutions with long-term commitments. It allows the assessment of solvency capital requirements and the allocation of risk budgets. This model allows one to avoid over-assessment of solvency capital requirements specifically after market disruptions. It relies on a dampener component in charge of refining risk assessment after market failures. Rather than aiming at a realistic and thus complex description of equity prices movements, this model concentrates on minimal features enabling accurate computation of capital requirements. It is defined both in a discrete and continuous fashion. In the latter case, we prove the existence, uniqueness and stability of the solution of the stochastic functional differential equation that specifies the model. One difficulty is that the proposed underlying stochastic process has neither stationary nor independent increments. We are however able to perform statistical analyses in view of its validation. Numerical experiments show that our model outperforms more elaborate ones of common use as far as medium-term (between 6 months and 5 years) risk assessment is concerned.

This article attempts to extend Arrow’s theorem of the deductible to the case of belief heterogeneity, which allows the insured and the insurer to have different beliefs about the distribution of the underlying loss. Like Huberman et al. [(1983) Bell Journal of Economics14(2), 415–426], we preclude ex post moral hazard by asking both parties in the insurance contract to pay more for a larger realization of the loss. It is shown that, ceteris paribus, full insurance above a constant deductible is always optimal for any chosen utility function of a risk-averse insured if and only if the insurer appears more optimistic about the conditional loss given non-zero loss than the insured in the sense of monotone hazard rate order. We derive the optimal deductible level explicitly and then examine how it is affected by the changes of the insured’s risk aversion, the insurance price and the degree of belief heterogeneity.