Insurance market transparency research trends: Bibliometric analysis

The risk of virus contracting during the COVID-19 pandemic has changed consumer preference for online shopping to meet their daily needs than shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. Online shopping presents a different environment, atmosphere, and experience. The possibility of ethical violations is higher during online than face-to-face transactions. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the influence of perceived health risk and customer perception of online retail ethics on consumer online shopping behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, involving seven variables, namely perceived health risk, security, privacy, non-deception, reliability fulfillment, service recovery, and online shopping behavior. The data were collected through an online survey by employing the purposive sampling technique to a consumer who has shopped online during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. 315 valid responses were obtained and analyzed through quantitative method using SEM-Amos. The results showed that perceived health risk and four variables of online retail ethics including security, privacy, reliability fulfillment, and service recovery affected online shopping behavior. Meanwhile, non-deception was found to have an insignificant effect. The coefficient value proved perceived health risk to be more dominant in influencing online shopping behavior than the variables of online retail ethics. Thus, consumers pay more concern for their health during online shopping. However, positive consumer perceptions of the behavior of online retail websites in providing services also can encourage consumers to shop online during this pandemic.

In the current conditions of the Ukrainian economy, which is characterized by crisis phenomena and frequent changes in legislation, the insurance organizations are facing a number of difficulties in maintaining their financial sustainability. Moreover, these processes take place under the increased requirements for solvency of insurers. However, a significant part of domestic insurance companies is financially unstable, which is conditioned not only by the lack of funds, but also by the low level of management. This situation hinders the further development of the insurance market in Ukraine and has a negative impact on all areas of the domestic financial system and prevents it from successful integration into the European financial field. In order to address this problem, it is necessary to distinguish the key groups of risks that affect the financial sustainability of insurance organizations, among which there are the following: insurance, strategic, market risk, risk of inefficient capital structure, risk of limiting the insurance company’s liquidity, tax risk, investment risk, operational risk, the risk of ineffective organizational structure of the enterprise, and information risk. It should be noted that under conditions of changing environment, the impact of these risks only increases, and therefore the task of minimizing the impact of these risks on the activities of insurance companies is highly important. Accordingly, the authors of the article proposed a four-stage strategy to manage the financial sustainability of the insurance company, the purpose of which is to identify the risks of limiting the insurer’s financial sustainability, their qualitative and quantitative assessment, as well as the development and implementation of appropriate measures to minimize and eliminate unacceptable consequences.

Financial performance is the fundamental aspect to test the performance of the companies. The performance of insurance sector, like any other service industry, is supposed to depend significantly on customers. When it comes to customers, it is an established fact that customer satisfaction would be an important element. Customer satisfaction primarily depends on the quality of service it gets. It can be safely hypothesized that better service quality would lead to higher satisfaction, which would ultimately lead to higher profits for the company. Studies on this relationship in the insurance sector for Saudi Arabia are missing. Hence, this study aims at studying both the profitability of companies and quality of service and tries to relate it to customer satisfaction. The results are quite surprising, as the study establishes that although the qualities of services are found wanting in many areas, companies are earning good profits. A probable reason could be the statutory nature of the services. Nevertheless, this study recommends improving the quality of services and differentiating services between age groups for further improvement.