Description: Risk based pricing addresses some of the shortcomings of traditional pricing methods by providing a framework for understanding the tradeoffs between shareholder risks and rewards using a robust, transparent and objective economic methodology that is consistent across products.

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: Interest sensitive products including SPDAs can be thought of as spread lending business. The purpose of the paper is to introduce the excess spread approach to measuring the profitability of nonparticipating insurance products. The article describes how the excess spread approach is used to price and manage the products and its risks. From Society of Actuaries Reporting Monograph, M-AS99-1.

Description: From a session at a meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in Las Vegas, NV May 22-24, 2000 The panelists cover: 1 The basic concepts underlying fuzzy logic, 2 Current applications to risk classification and pricing and 3 Future possible uses of fuzzy logic.

Description: A review of recent trends in immediate non-refund annuity mortality and a presentation of a modification of the a-1949 Table with Projection Scale B which reflects these recent mortality trends. Followed by several discussion papers submitted

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: This paper presents a generalized profits released model which resolves the difficulties of the traditional analysis posed by products that have fluctuating profits and losses over time or have no initial investment. Discussions of the paper are included.

Description: Enhanced or impaired annuities are life annuities underwritten to reflect annuitants' actual mortality. They are not currently prevalent in the U.S. or Canada, where life annuities assume low mortality and are thus unfair for impaired lives. This paper looks at the present annuity marketplace in the United States and Canada. It also reviews the underwriting and marketing of life annuities in the United Kingdom where “enhanced” life annuities are available for a broader cross section of the marketplace. It also reviews the use of P&C risk classification techniques and how they might apply to the annuity marketplace as well as potential legal constraints on broader risk classification for life annuities.

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.