Description: The NAIC's 'Life Insurance Illustrations Model Regulation,' which goes into effect on January 1, 1997, is largely a response to the perceived misrepresentations in life insurance illustrations, of which vanishing premiums is a notorious example. From an actuarial perspective, this state of affairs presents an interesting challenge. Rather than disallowing illustrations of risky contracts, why not develop an illustration for potential policyholders which adequately conveys the essence of these contracts and their probabilistic nature. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some preliminary observations related to the development of such illustrations.

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: This article introduces a new CD-ROM tool for continuing education, the first of which is about the recent Actuarial Research Conference.

Description: This paper describes the nature of a multimedia computer-based colloquium and demonstrates how the technology can be used within an actuarial science instruction setting and describes the steps taken to ease the transition into this environment. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House 1992 Vol. 1 .

Description: The note begins with a short overview of key characteristics of a modern tontine. This is followed by a representation of a tontine flowchart that explicitly displays the components of a tontine and their relationships. The remainder of the note discusses the specifics of those components, including: the valuation and buy-in module, the active life test, settlement options, and periodic payments.

Description: Hybrids of the soft computing SC technologies have been applied to market forecasting and trading rules, and in many cases have demonstrated better performance than competing approaches. The purpose of this research is to investigate a representative group of these applications and to document the manner in which hybrids of the SC technologies were implemented.

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.

Description: Shapiro 1990 documented some of the criteria used by actuaries when selecting the assumptions for actuarial valuations. He noted, however, that many of these criteria are often were in conflict with one another. This paper uses expected utility theory to model this process of choosing actuarial assumption when faced with potentially conflicting criteria. The three criteria considered are prudence, best estimate and conservativeness.

Description: The Lee and Carter LC method is getting widely adopted for long-run forecasts of age specific mortality rates. That popularity is first due to the model simplicity. Moreover, the LC model has given successful results for various countries e.g. U.S., Chile, G7 countries. However, some difficulties arose when using population data from certain countries such as UK and Australia. In the present paper, the LC model is applied to data from four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The Singular Value Decomposition SVD, the Weighted Least Square WLS and the Maximum Likelihood estimate MLE are used. These approaches give satisfactory results. The appropriate fitting period needs, however, to be well chosen. The properties of the model's parameters are studied using a bootstrap simulation.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that presents preliminary observations with respect to probabilistic fuzzy systems.