Description: Behavioral economics is the alternative to the traditional ways (surveys and focus groups) we've been using to try to understand the drivers of customer behavior in the insurance industry. It merges psychology with traditional economic theory, offering insights into individual decision making behavior that go beyond the purely rational model. Within the sphere of health insurance, there are countless behaviors, not just of customers, but of underwriters, medical professionals and claims specialists which may be better explained by behavioral economics. Applying concepts from behavioral economics in live trials it is possible to bring about benefits such as increasing sales and retention rates, improving claims processing and encouraging more accurate disclosure. Swiss Re's global research team partners with its reinsurance clients to incorporate behavioral economics concepts into their letters, websites, forms and scripts by running A/B tests to understand what is driving customer behavior. The team currently has over 100 tests in progress with more than 40 clients, including many in the United States. The partnerships are producing clear business benefits, increasing sales, renewals, health disclosure and turnaround speed for claims payments. These changes are driven by small, inexpensive changes in communications with customers, and we'd like to share some of our insights with you. We've increased upsell rates, disclosure and email open rates, and reduced lapses, turnaround times and appointment no-show rates, to name just a few examples. Behavioral economics is the topic on everyone's lips with insurers and reinsurers all beginning to talk about it in earnest. Our team has been working hard for nearly 4 years and in that time instead of talking, we've been doing, and now we can share with you what a difference behavioral economics can actually make for insurance.

Description: This is the full version of CompAct newsletter, published May 2004, Issue No. 17.

Description: The editor of the newsletter provides a running list of articles included in the issue highlighting such topics as the applicability genetic algorithms, the power of group dynamics, judgmental forecasting, improvement in mortality and complexity science.

Description: Actuary of the Future Section Chair Dave Snell shares some insights on the section's 18 years and provides a preview of the year to come.

Description: The author recounts his experience as a keynote speaker at the Actuarial Research Conference and provides advice to young actuaries to present complex subjects in an understandable manner.

Description: This is a gentle introduction to fuzzy logic. It explains the concept and use of linguistic variables, reference ranges, fuzzification, and defuzzification without the usual advanced mathematics that sometimes obscure these ideas.

Description: Most courses in Excel, Word, PowerPoint or other Microsoft Office products stop just short of teaching you the highly productive things you can do with Visual Basic for Applications VBA, the powerful language that comes free with your purchase of Microsoft Office. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 30, No. 3.

Description: Panelists discuss pricing issues, patent issues, safeguards, successes, failures, and other observations about the future of automated underwriting. From the 2002 Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 28, No. 3. Session 134PD of the Boston Annual Meeting.

Description: Actuaries are Known as highly ethical. Data Science poses ethical challenges for our profession.