Description: This article discusses an update to a survey that focuses on how companies are trying to price for and understand the risks inherent in the products they sell.

Description: This is an excel spreadsheet with some data pertaining to an article of the same name from the Product Development News

Description: This paper investigates a technique for developing investment assumptions for pricing that are consistent with the investment practices of the company for use in the pricing of single premium immediate annuities. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1979, Vol. 31.

Description: The Policyholder Behavior in the Tail Risk Management Section Working Group issued its fifth survey to gather the range of assumptions actuaries use in pricing, reserving, and risk management of minimum guarantees on Variable Annuity products, such as death benefits, income benefits, withdrawal benefits and maturity benefits.

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits and indexed variable annuities. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approaches to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications regarding the difficulty of risk management.

Description: This paper concentrates on the issue of determining interest rates for pricing the guaranteed purchase rates at time of retirement under a group annuity contract, but the technique developed can also be applied to possible variations from expected mortality. A discussion of this paper is included.

Description: In actuarial work, we are frequently confronted with problems with more than one apparently reasonable answer. This article deals with one of these, where the Federal DAC cost can be applied in an apparently reasonable, but incorrect, manner.

Description: Presented at the Living to 100 Symposium, January 2011. This study explores increasing life expectancy by examining the basic properties of survival curves. Specifically, the author checks for signs of mortality compression, using a non-traditional approach. The results indicate that human longevity is likely to increase, at least for a while, and longevity risk should be seriously considered in pricing annuity products. Some suggestions for dealing with the longevity risk are also proposed.

Description: This session at the SOA 1990 Hartford Spring Meeting is about the role of the investment operation in the product development process, the process of managing an in-force block of business, and how the differences in Statutory and GAAP accounting affect the pricing process.

Description: A recent SOA regional meeting featured discussion on an age-old actuarial debate: Within the same company, should the return on equity ROE target vary by profit center PC depending upon the risk of the PC?