IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jrinsu/v86y2019i1p213-235.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ambiguity and Insurance: Capital Requirements and Premiums

Author

Listed:
  • Simon Dietz
  • Oliver Walker

Abstract

Many insurance contracts are contingent on events such as hurricanes, terrorist attacks, or political upheavals, whose probabilities are ambiguous. This article offers a theory to underpin the large body of empirical evidence showing that higher premiums are charged under ambiguity. We model a (re)insurer that maximizes profit subject to a survival constraint that is sensitive to the range of estimates of the probability of ruin, as well as the insurer's attitude toward this ambiguity. We characterize when one book of insurance is more ambiguous than another and general circumstances in which a more ambiguous book requires at least as large a capital holding. We subsequently derive several explicit formulae for the price of insurance contracts under ambiguity, each of which identifies the extra ambiguity load.

Suggested Citation

  • Simon Dietz & Oliver Walker, 2019. "Ambiguity and Insurance: Capital Requirements and Premiums," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 86(1), pages 213-235, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jrinsu:v:86:y:2019:i:1:p:213-235
    DOI: 10.1111/jori.12208
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/jori.12208
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/jori.12208?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chia‐Chun Chiang & Hugh Hoikwang Kim & Greg Niehaus, 2022. "Opaque liabilities, learning, and the cost of equity capital for insurers," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 89(4), pages 1031-1076, December.
    2. Simon Dietz & Falk Niehörster, 2021. "Pricing ambiguity in catastrophe risk insurance," The Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics (The Geneva Association), vol. 46(2), pages 112-132, September.
    3. Johanna Etner & Meglena Jeleva & Natacha Raffin, 2021. "Climate policy: How to deal with ambiguity?," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 72(1), pages 263-301, July.
    4. Nan Zhang & Heng Xu, 2024. "Fairness of Ratemaking for Catastrophe Insurance: Lessons from Machine Learning," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 35(2), pages 469-488, June.
    5. Maristella Botticini & Pietro Buri & Massimo Marinacci, 2023. "Presidential Address 2023: The Beauty of Uncertainty: The Rise of Insurance Contracts and Markets in Medieval Europe," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 21(6), pages 2287-2326.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jrinsu:v:86:y:2019:i:1:p:213-235. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ariaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.