Deductible Contracts Against Fraudulent Claims: Evidence From Automobile Insurance

Georges Dionne () and Robert Gagné ()

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2001, vol. 83, issue 2, 290-301

Abstract: Insurance fraud is now recognized as a significant resourceallocation problem in many markets. The object of this study is to verify how straight deductible contracts may affect the equilibrium level of falsification in automobile insurance. This type of contract is observed in many markets, even if it is not optimal under costly state falsification. A higher deductible may create incentives to fraud or cheat, particularly when the insured anticipates that the claim has a small probability of being audited. To verify this proposition, we estimate a loss equation for which one of the determinants is the amount of the deductible, using a data set of claims filed for damages following an automobile accident with twenty insurance companies in Quebec in 1992. Because we have access only to reported losses, a higher deductible also implies a lower probability of reporting small losses. To isolate the fraud effect related to the presence of a deductible in the contract, we jointly estimate a loss equation and a threshold equation. The threshold is the amount over which an insured decides to report a given loss. It can be interpreted as a personal deductible, and it is not observable. Our results indicate, among other things, that with an appropriate correction for selectivity the amount of the deductible is a significant determinant of the reported loss, at least when no other vehicle is involved in the accident; in other words, when the presence of witnesses is less likely. © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/00346530151143824 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:83:y:2001:i:2:p:290-301

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().