Description: This article is a summary of the authors’ two other articles where they discuss pension systems and whether they do in fact distort retirement decisions.

Description: Highlights a new research paper on determining discount rates for pension plans, by John Turner. The paper breaks new ground on deciding on the appropriate discount rate for untradeable benefit obligations, with a comprehensive summary of the field.

Description: The article makes reference to how the intervention by government agencies and institutions into the financial marketplace are creating distortions. This artificial tampering into market mechanisms will likely result in major financial dislocations down the road as natural economic forces (coined by the term "invisible hand") eventually are allowed to come into play.

Description: This article considers considers how the assumptions and statistical methods used to analyze investments are likely to change as a result of the events of Black Monday, October 19, 1987.

Description: This session covers the economic principles of “buffet pricing” and whether such pricing can be used for health care. Presented is an argument in favor of “all you can eat” pricing of health care where consumers pay a fixed fee and have no constraints on consumption. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 27, No. 1, Session 118

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

Description: This article describes seven results from behavioral finance that actuaries may find useful: heuristics, the endowment effect, loss aversion, prospect theory, satisficing, strategic thinking and agent-based modeling.

Description: A review of the academic article "Health Insurance for ‘Humans’: Information Frictions, Plan Choice, and Consumer Welfare."

Description: This article provides an overview of the different types of real world interest rate scenarios that practitioners use in the life insurance industry and explores different approaches to building those generators.

Description: This paper discusses retirement planning information and the signals it provides. It focuses on the issue of communicating lump sum versus income benefits. It discusses challenges in communicating income benefits and provides some alternatives.