Game Analysis of Risk Factors under Export Credit Insurance Finance

Export credit insurance plays an important role in promoting exportation, and thus it represents a guarantee of payment receivable for exporter. It not only offers a good way to disperse and release risk caused by uncertainty of foreign countries and importers’ credit, but also inspires a good finance support for exporter. Export corporations can apply loan from banks easily with the guarantee of export credit insurance. Characterized with lower threshold, export credit insurance finance(ECIF) becomes a good funding choice especially for small and medium companies and brings considerable intermediate businesses to commercial banks. Despite the benefits of ECIF, false trades appear frequently due to the intricate risks that are hard to be measured by quantitative method. The risks covered by export credit insurance include commercial risk and political risk. Commercial risks can be classified by two reasons: importer bankruptcy and importer collusion with exporter. The risk of insolvency can be measured by modern credit risk models, however, the probability that importer breaches a contract due to dishonesty is hard to be discerned because of information asymmetry and high cost of investigation. In ECIF, the risk is even harder to be measured as risks form both importer and exporter are involved. Game theory is widely used in adverse selection and moral hazard. The application of game theory inspired a microeconomic way of risk analysis in ECIF. The case of ECIF can be a seen as a game among the export enterprise, importer, insurer and bank. This paper will figure out the utility of each party under certain default situation and analyze each risk factor. We adopt joint game approach and tree model to obtain the equilibrium result. The purpose is to maximize the expected utility of each party and minimize the probability of exporter and importer’s collusion as they are the core reasons for the loss of commercial bank and export credit agency (ECA). Since the export credit insurance industry and related risk research are still in the early stage in China, we hope this study can enlighten a new way of risk analysis on ECIF.