Organizing insurance supply for new and undiversifiable risks

David Alary, Catherine Bobtcheff and Carole Haritchabalet ()
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David Alary: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Carole Haritchabalet: CATT - Centre d'Analyse Théorique et de Traitement des données économiques - UPPA - Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, UPPA - Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

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Abstract: This paper explores how insurance companies can coordinate to extend their joint capacity for the coverage of new and undiversifiable risks. The undiversifiable nature of such risks causes a shortage of insurance capacity and their limited knowledge makes learning and information sharing necessary. We develop a unified theoretical model to analyse co-insurance agreements. We show that organizing this insurance supply amounts to sharing a common value divisible good between capacity constrained and privately informed insurers with a reserve price. Coinsurance via the creation of an insurance pool turns out to operate as a uniform price auction with an "exit/re-entry" option. We compare it to a discriminatory auction for which no specific agreements are needed. Both auction formats lead to different coverage/premium tradeoffs. If at least one insurer provides an optimistic expertise about the risk, the pool offers higher coverage. This result is reversed when all insurers are pessimistic about the risk. Static comparative results with respect to the severity of the capacity constraints and the reserve price are provided. In the case of completely new risks, a regulator aiming at maximizing the expected coverage should promote the pool when the reserve price is low enough or when competition is high enough.

Keywords: Reserve price; Competition; Common value divisible good auctions; Undiversifiable and new risks; Coinsurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias and nep-rmg
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Working Paper: Organizing insurance supply for new and undiversifiable risks (2020)
Working Paper: Organizing insurance supply for new and undiversifiable risks (2020)
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