Description: In a recent Society of Actuaries' regional meeting, there was a discussion on an age-old actuarial problem. Within the same company, should the return on equity ROE target vary by profit center depending upon the risk of the profit center? For example, should company management demand a different ROE from the Group Health line than from the Ordinary Life line?

Description: This paper presents a new approach for pricing insurance contracts. The approach is based both on economic and probabilistic arguments. The novel property of this paper is that the pricing argument is based on two factors determining the insurer's expected profit: the first one is the net revenue from selling insurance contracts and the second is the possible loss due to insolvency. From the Actuarial Research Clearing House ARCH 1997 Vol. 1.