Issue #1 (Volume 9 2018)

The authors studied the process of merging insured groups, and the splitting of the profit that arises in the process due to the fact that the risk for the merged group is essentially reduced. There emerges a profit and there are various ways of splitting this profit between the combined groups. Techniques from game theory, in particular cooperative game theory turn out to be useful in splitting of the profit. The authors proceed in this paper to apply techniques of utility theory to study the possibility of a fair split of that profit. In this research, the authors consider a group of n parties 1,...,n such that each of them has a corresponding utility function u₁(x),...,u_n(x) . Given a positive amount of money C, a fair split of C is a vector (c₁,...,c_n) in Rⁿ, such that c₁ +...c_n = C and u₁(c₁) = u₂(c₂) = ... = u_n(c_n). The authors presume the utility functions to be normalized, that is u_i(c) = 1 for each party i, i = 1, ... ,n. The authors show that a fair split exists and is unique for any given set of utility functions u₁(x), ..., u_n(x), and for any given amount of money C. The existence theorem follows from observing simplexes. The uniqueness follows from the utility functions being strictly increasing. An example is given of normalizing some utility functions, and evaluating the fair split in special cases. In this article, the authors study the case of merging two groups (or more) of insured members, they provide an evaluation of the emerging benefit in the process, and the splitting of the benefit between the groups.

Life insurance is a very important segment of the economy of most countries as demonstrated by the investments, premium revenue and numbers employed. Hence, it is paramount to determine accurately how well life insurance companies (LICs) perform and how viable they are for the benefit of both other industries and national economies.
Three papers that investigate LIC efficiency directly analyze how efficiency affects LIC profits. One critical feature is that they show that the inefficiency of LICs can greatly affect their (financial) outcome and ultimately their survivorship. Thus, said research clearly indicates that life insurer efficiency is a crucial area to investigate and assess and that it could greatly enhance the ability to properly monitor and inspect the life insurers.
This article co-ordinates information regarding life insurance efficiency studies to help researchers learn which approaches, methods and output/input proxies to use. While some papers do so for some of the aspects that are important and necessary for life insurance efficiency studies, this is the first to deal with said aspects together. More specifically, this paper especially considers and evaluates the different methods and output proxies used in life insurance efficiency studies, as they seem to be the elements where the most disagreement exists between researchers. In addition, this article is unique in examining how input (proxy) prices are used in life insurance efficiency studies.

This study investigates the features of the development of the discriminant model of diagnostics of the socio-economic potential of health insurance, and the trends in the medical insurance system development in Ukraine. This study uses logistic, statistical and normative methods to assess of the socio-economic potential of health insurance in Ukraine from 2010 to 2017. The empirical result shows that the block assessment of the financial potential of health insurance gives the complete information on the dynamics of individual indicators and trends of the branch. The need for assessment of the socio-economic potential of health insurance in order to improve the efficiency of the public financial management of the health care finance system and the insurance market regulation has been justified.

This paper compares the weather insurance, weather index insurance and index futures and focuses on why China needs to develop weather indexes and adopt and trade weather index futures. It further discusses how to construct the indexes and futures and how to price them. Different from the Heating Degree Days (HDDs) and Cooling Degree Days (CDDs) used at Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), it develops the Extremely Heating Days (EHDs) and Extremely Cooling Days (ECDs) to derive relevant temperature-based weather index futures. Recently China has started using weather index insurance to cover farmers’ risk. Through comparisons of weather index futures with index insurance, this study shows the necessity and importance of using the weather index futures to better protect farmers and better develop China’s financial markets.

Guaranteed Minimum Income benefit are variable annuities contract, which offer the policyholder the possibility to con- vert the guarantee level into an annuities income for life. This paper focuses on the optimal customer behavior assuming the maximization of the discounted expected future cash flows over the full life of the contract duration. Using convenient scaling properties of the contract value enables to reduce the complexity (dimension) of the problem and to characterize the policyholder’s decision as a function of the contract moneyness across four main choices: zero withdrawals, guaranteed withdrawals, lapse and the income period election. Sensitivities to key drivers such as the market volatility, the interest rate and the roll-up rate illustrate how crucial are not only the environment, but also the product design features, in order to ensure a fair and robust pricing for both customer and life insurer. In particular, the authors find that most empirical contracts are usually underpriced compared to mean optimal behavior pricing, which empirically translated into multiple updates of behavior assumptions and re-reserving by life insurers in the recent years.

The research is aimed to evaluate the internet marketing strategies in of life insurance companies in Ukraine. The insurance service in the time of digitalization faces scenarios of implementation in the marketing strategy on-line component. The main challenge for Ukrainian life insurance companies comparatively with the world practice is non-obligatory status of such kind of insurance contracts. So, on the one hand, costs of operation, regulatory pressures and inflexible technology infrastructure are increasing, and, on the other hand, economic recession does not allow to increase the number of insured persons, premiums and profit growth.
Sector of financial services is characterized by an increase in the level of competition, life insurance compelled to compete with pensions funds, banks and other financial institutions in order to defend their market share. Insurance companies marketing strategy determines how an insurer can best achieve its goals and objectives, keep existing customers and attract new ones with minimal costs.
Keeping all the above problems around the study would attempt to study all the factors that contributed to the effective marketing strategies. This paper presents different marketing strategies that are taken up in life insurance services keeping in view external and internal environment of the company.