Description: The study of Employee Benefits has always been aided by using financial algorithms. During recent semesters, the Lotus 1-2-3 package Lotus has been introduced to students due to the explosion of its use in the business community. This paper will show how our students use Lotus to design a spreadsheet for computing minimum annual distributions from tax-sheltered plans.

Description: This paper considers the ERM problem as an adaptation and stability problem of complex system development. The basic approach of W. Ross Ashby and its development by S. Beer are applied. The author advances the cybernetic functional feedback model as applied to the integrated ERM structural mechanism. Such formulation of the ERM problems seems promising to correctly detail and structurally integrate the various issues, including operational and financial systems linkage, key adaptation parameter of time and its different periods, optimal activity and others.

Description: American actuaries are increasingly involved in risk management. This paper presents an Overview of the role of the American actuary in risk management today, a book review of a remarkable new work by a philosopher of science, and a challenge to the reader.

Description: Actuarial literature in the twenty-five years includes discussions of a well known inequality. Among the recent papers on various aspects of this classic result are those by Berin 1970, Olson 1975 and Sarason 1960. A standard method for achieving this inequality uses Jensen's inequality. This is the method used by Bowers, et al 1983. We will also employ this method in an attempt to learn about it.

Description: In the copula literature there are many bivariate distribution families but very few higher dimensional ones. Moreover, most of these are difficult to work with. Some of the bivariate families can be extended to more dimensions but in general the construction of distribution functions with more than two variables is a difficult problem. This paper introduces a construction method that is straightforward to implement and can produce multivariate distribution functions of any dimension.

Description: This paper is the introduction to the Society of Actuaries 50th Anniversary Monograph, which contains significant papers published by SOA-sponsored research publications during the past fifty years. This introduction describes the selection process and provides a brief summary of each of the seven papers making up the monograph.

Description: A description of the of FAP design and development process. The release of FAP Module 1 earlier this year marked a significant achievement for the Society of Actuaries' basic education system.

Description: During the last decade, a vast activity had been observed in generalizing of the classical discrete distributions. The main idea was to apply the extended versions fur modeling different kinds of dependent count or frequency data structure in various fields. In the present paper we suggest extensions of the classical univariate geometric, negative binomial, Poisson, Bernoulli, binomial and logarithmic series distributions, by including an additional parameter. It has a natural interpretation in terms of zero-inflation, and because of this we named the corresponding generalized versions adding inflated-parameter.

Description: It has been twenty years since DeWit 1982 first applied fuzzy logic FL to insurance. That article sought to quantify the fuzziness in underwriting. Since then, the universe of discourse has expanded considerably and now the FL methodologies include used fuzzy set theory, fuzzy numbers and fuzzy arithmetic, fuzzy inference systems, fuzzy clustering algorithms, fuzzy linear programming, fuzzy regression, and hybrids involving other soft computing technologies. This article presents an overview of these studies.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to discuss computer application, the management of an insurance enterprise in an automobile insurance marketplace wherein a number of insurers compete for marketshare and profit. The paper begins with a description of the computer program next, a cursory description of the model is given then, the assumptions of the model are discussed next, potential future modifications are discussed and, finally, a prognosis is given.