Description: This is a review of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Good Business: Leadership, Flow and the Making of Meaning.

Description: A review of the book "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty" by Dan Ariely. The book is about lying, cheating, stealing, and shaving the truth -- something done by everybody, but the factors influencing this can be a bit surprising.

Description: The abstract for a paper that focuses on default distributions and why they are important.

Description: Traditional predictive tools are not built to deal with the variability the world currently faces. The COVID-19 pandemic amounts to a prolonged black swan event, for which one must look past conventional assessments to arrive at any level of confident predictions. Behavioral analysis factors for biases and heuristics designed specifically for uncertain evolutionary contexts, and which are the primary drivers of market participants’ decisions at present. Through understanding the most likely behaviors of individuals, it becomes possible to arrive at an aggregate understanding of market outcomes.

Description: We discussed impacts of procrastination and strategies to harness the power of inertia to aid individuals in their pursuit of future financial well-being.

Description: This report presents the results of six focus groups with retirees who have at least $100,000 of investable assets and must depend on that money to maintain their lifestyles because they do not have sufficient amounts of annuitized income from Social Security and defined benefit plans to meet all of their expenses. The purpose of the focus groups was to gain an understanding of how current retirees approach key financial decisions about managing their money in retirement. The benefits of this qualitative study are multidisciplinary. It can help: 1. actuaries design better retirement financial systems, 2. the financial services industry understand areas of misperception and causes of poor management, and 3. provide policy-makers an understanding of how to drive public policy goals.

Description: Review of the address given by Richard H. Thaler, Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago at the Investment Section at the Society of Actuaries meeting in New York on October 20.

Description: Fraud is often a dynamic and challenging problem in credit card lending business. Supervised modeling/segmentation techniques are commonly used in fraud detection to distinguish risky transactions from non-risky transactions. However, these techniques frequently rely on identifying risky behavior at a global level. In this paper, along with the classical approach, a new technique has been studied to improve the behavioral fraud detection capability. The application of this proposed technique enables us to identify risky behavior at the account level.

Description: Applying behavioral-science and shared-value principles to insurance is a win-win proposition for both insurers and clients.

Description: The second of a three-part series introducing the technique of visioning. Part I appeared in the June 1996 issue of Actuarial Futures.