IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/feb/framed/00170.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pay-as-you-speed: Two field experiments on controlling adverse selection and moral hazard in traffic insurance

Author

Listed:
  • Lars Hultkrantz
  • Gunnar Lindberg
  • Jan-Eric Nilsson
  • Fridtjof Thomas

Abstract

Around one million people are killed world wide every year in road-traffic accidents. The risks and consequences of accidents increase progressively with speed, which ultimately is determined by the individual driver. The behaviour of the motorist thus affects both her own and other peoples safety. Internalisation of external costs of road transport has hitherto been focused on distance-based taxes or insurance premiums. While these means, as they are designed today, may affect driven distance, they have no influence on driving behaviour. This paper argues that by linking on-board positioning systems to insurance premiums it is possible to reward careful driving and get drivers to self select into different risk categories depending on their compliance to speed limits. We report two economic field experiments that have tested ways to induce car-owners to have technical platforms installed in their vehicle in order to affect the extent of speeding. It is demonstrated that a bonus to remunerate those that have the device installed, tantamount to a lower insurance premium, increases drivers?propensity to accept the technical devices. In a second experiment the size of the bonus is made dependent on the actual frequency of speeding. We find that this is a second way to discipline users to drive at legal speeds.

Suggested Citation

  • Lars Hultkrantz & Gunnar Lindberg & Jan-Eric Nilsson & Fridtjof Thomas, 2005. "Pay-as-you-speed: Two field experiments on controlling adverse selection and moral hazard in traffic insurance," Framed Field Experiments 00170, The Field Experiments Website.
    • Handle: RePEc:feb:framed:00170
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00170.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Glenn W. Harrison & John A. List, 2004. "Field Experiments," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 42(4), pages 1009-1055, December.
    2. Royalty, Anne Beeson & Hagens, John, 2005. "The effect of premiums on the decision to participate in health insurance and other fringe benefits offered by the employer: evidence from a real-world experiment," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 95-112, January.
    3. Hultkrantz, Lars, 2004. "Voluntary road pricing," Working Papers 2004:5, Örebro University, School of Business.
    4. Parry, Ian W. H., 2004. "Comparing alternative policies to reduce traffic accidents," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(2), pages 346-368, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Levitt, Steven D. & List, John A., 2009. "Field experiments in economics: The past, the present, and the future," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 53(1), pages 1-18, January.
    2. Arvidsson, Sara, 2010. "Reducing asymmetric information with usage-based automobile insurance," Working Papers 2010:2, Swedish National Road & Transport Research Institute (VTI), revised 03 Feb 2011.

    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:feb:framed:00170. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Joe Seidel). General contact details of provider: http://www.fieldexperiments.com .

    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.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.