Some remarks on the effect of risk sharing and diversification for infinite mean risks

Alfred Müller

ASTIN Bulletin, 2025, vol. 55, issue 3, 747-756

Abstract: The basic principle of any version of insurance is the paradigm that exchanging risk by sharing it in a pool is beneficial for the participants. In case of independent risks with a finite mean, this is the case for risk-averse decision-makers. The situation may be very different in case of infinite mean models. In that case it is known that risk sharing may have a negative effect, which is sometimes called the nondiversification trap. This phenomenon is well known for infinite mean stable distributions. In a series of recent papers, similar results for infinite mean Pareto and Fréchet distributions have been obtained. We further investigate this property by showing that many of these results can be obtained as special cases of a simple result demonstrating that this holds for any distribution that is more skewed than a Cauchy distribution. We also relate this to the situation of deadly catastrophic risks, where we assume a positive probability for an infinite value. That case gives a very simple intuition why this phenomenon can occur for such catastrophic risks. We also mention several open problems and conjectures in this context.

Date: 2025
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