A sharing mechanism of investment outcome for interest-sensitive life insurance products

Hangsuck Lee, Hyung-Suk Choi and Hongjun Ha

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 2020, vol. 54, issue C

Abstract: As growing sales of insurance contracts with a saving feature, an issue of sharing investment outcome gets the attention of insurers and policyholders. This paper focuses on a systematic way of finding the sharing mechanism for an optimal contract design in such a way that a policyholder and an insurer maximize their expected utilities. We adopt the policyholder and the insurer as a principal and an agent, respectively, and regard a share of the investment performance as an incentive for the insurer to elicit efforts. As a result of this setting, the moral hazard issue generated from the insurer is unavoidable. For the purpose, the Holmström (1979)’s principal-agent model with limited observability of the insurer’s action plays a leading role in resolving a pie-cutting problem. Under our model assumption, the sharing mechanism states that a portion of the outcome belonging to the insurer is a nondecreasing function of the excess of the portfolio return over a benchmark return when the two parties are risk-averse. In particular, the sensitivity of the sharing portion has an S-shape curve which is consistent with the insurer’s risk propensity.

Keywords: Sharing mechanism; Interest-sensitive products; Principal-agent problem; Holmström model; Moral hazard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecofin:v:54:y:2020:i:c:s1062940820301340

DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2020.101237

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