Personal Bias in Automobile Claims Settlement
Abstract
Despite the importance of claims handling practices to consumers and insurers, relatively little research has been done in this area. Our purpose here is to consider one aspect of automobile bodily injury liability claims management: the assignment of fault across parties as judged by the insured defendant's claims adjuster. Because legal fault assessment directly affects whether a defendant is held liable, and if so, for how much, this aspect of claims management is significant. We use accident data from the 1997 Insurance Research Council Closed Claim Survey to test for relationships between fault assessment and gender, age, and state comparative negligence rules. Controlling for actual fault, we find a greater assessment of fault against female, young, and elderly drivers. The results of the study are of interest to insurers seeking to provide better customer service, to consumer advocacy groups interested in claims settlement practices, and to insurance regulators. Copyright 2003 The Journal of Risk and Insurance.Download Info
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Article provided by The American Risk and Insurance Association in its journal Journal of Risk & Insurance.
Volume (Year): 70 (2003)
Issue (Month): 2 ()
Pages: 185-205
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Ayuso, Mercedes & Santolino, Miguel, 2007. "Predicting automobile claims bodily injury severity with sequential ordered logit models," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 71-83, July.
- Santolino, Miguel, 2010. "Determinants of the decision to appeal against motor bodily injury judgements made by Spanish trial courts," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(1), pages 37-45, March.
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