Description: Review of an excellent new guide to passing actuarial exams. It was written by Roy Ju, who became an FSA while still a Junior in university.

Description: Introduces the new behavioral finance subgroup and talks about why such a subgroup is needed.

Description: This discussion examines the relationship of Operations Research to the actuarial profession, the extent traditional actuarial work can be regarded as Operations Research, types of life insurance company problems lending themselves to Operations Research study, and the relationship of electronic data processing field to Operations Research.

Description: Letter fron the Chairman.

Description: Book review of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Description: We apply decision theory to develop a credibility formula that minimizes a loss function that is a linear combination of a squared-error term and a second-derivative term. The squared-error term measures the accuracy of the estimator, while the second-derivative term constrains the estimator to be close to linear.

Description: Discussion about the need for, and approach to, measuring organizational expertise ton ensure the learning investment is resulting in expertise growth.

Description: This article discusses the history of the Sun Life of Canada inserting a question about smoking in their life insurance applications. Actuary John M. Bragg used the Sun Life mortality ratios, supplemented by other data from life companies, from the Cancer Society, and from the U.S. Surgeon General, to construct his non-smoker and smoker mortality tables and to produce his Health Insurance Report which was the starting point for companies that have introduced smoker/nonsmoker differentials for health insurance.

Description: In this book review of ‘Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results,’ by Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris and Robert Morison, the reviewer notes it has attracted the attention of senior managers and executives who are interested in developing a culture of fact based vs. “gut based” decision making. The book describes the value of transitioning to an analytic based culture and how to do it. From ‘The Stepping Stone’ issue number 43.

Description: A look at cognitive biases, which are common tendencies of people when thinking about issues and when making decisions. Confirmation bias and sunk cost effects.