ALARY David

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.

In this note, we consider an adverse selection problem involving an insurance market à la Rothschild-Stiglitz. We assume that part of the loss is uninsurable as in the case with health care or environmental risk. We characterize sufficient conditions such that adverse selection by itself does not distort competitive insurance contracts. A sufficiently large uninsurable loss provides an incentive to high-risk policy holders not to mimic low-risk policy holders without distorting the optimal coverage.

This paper discusses the decision of the European Commission not to renew the antitrust exemption for the setting up of syndicates in the insurance industry. Pools are constituted to provide insurance for undiversifiable and/or new risks for which insurers with private expertise are capacity constrained. Our objective is to study if such syndicates improve insurance supply. Organizing this supply amounts to sharing a common value divisible good between capacity constrained and privately informed agents with a reserve price. Pools turn out to operate as a uniform price auction with an "exit/re-entry" option that we compare to a discriminatory auction where no specific agreements are needed. Both auction formats lead to different coverage/premium tradeoffs. If at least one insurer provides an optimistic expertise, the pool offers both lower premiums and higher coverage. This result is reversed when all insurers are pessimistic about the risk. Static comparative results with respect to capacity constraints and reserve price are provided.

The European insurance industry benefits from some special antitrust exemptions. Indeed, insurers can syndicate, via a "pool", for the coverage of undiversifiable risks. We show that the pool issue amounts to share a common value divisible good between capacity constrained agents with a reserve price and private information. We characterize the equilibrium risk premium of this game and the resulting insurance capacity offered. We then compare the pool to a discriminatory auction upon two dimensions, the total capacity insured and the premiums. There is no clear domination of one auction format. Strength of affiliation and competition are key variables.

The European insurance industry benefits from some special antitrust exemptions. Indeed, insurers can syndicate, via a "pool", for the coverage of undiversifiable risks. We show that the pool issue amounts to share a common value divisible good between capacity constrained agents with a reserve price and private information. We characterize the equilibrium risk premium of this game and the resulting insurance capacity offered. We then compare the pool to a discriminatory auction upon two dimensions, the total capacity insured and the premiums. There is no clear domination of one auction format. Strength of affiliation and competition are key variables.

In this paper, we derive a set of simple conditions such that ambiguity aversion always raises the demand for self-insurance and the insurance coverage, but decreases the demand for self-protection. We also characterize the optimal insurance design under ambiguity aversion, and exhibit a case in which the straight deductible contract is optimal as in the expected utility model.

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The purpose of this thesis is to provide a study of the effects of anti-criminal behavior mechanisms applied to anti-selection problems in the insurance and credit markets. The first part of this thesis analyzes the anti-selection problem in the insurance market. Policyholders have information about the risk to be insured that is unknown to the insurers. After the risk has been realized, the insurers can perform a costly but perfect audit of the type of each insured. In the first chapter, we present a model of a competitive insurance market. The auditability of the type of insureds allows insurers to require risk statements from the insureds and impose penalties for fraud. The use of auditing and sanctions allows for increased risk coverage of low-risk insureds. In the second chapter, we consider a monopolistic insurance market. We assume that policyholders can vote on the levels of penalty the insurer can impose on a fraudster. We study the effects of these votes on equilibrium contracts. We show that the penalty voted (which maximizes the utility of the riskiest policyholders) can be more penalizing than the nullity of the contract. In the second part of the third chapter, we present a model of adverse selection in a competitive credit market. We consider the introduction of social sanctions in debt contracts when borrowers cannot provide collateral. We study the effects of these sanctions through two types of loan contracts: individual loan contracts and loan contracts binding several entrepreneurs. We show that the presence of social sanctions allows for the discrimination of projects based on their quality when contractors do not know each other. We obtain that group loan contracts can dominate individual loan contracts.