Description: The latest installment in a series that applies Buddhist principles to actuarial practice. This particular installment focuses on the author's recent experience in recovering from serious injury, the lessons from Buddhism learned during that process, and the parallels of healing to the challenges actuaries face when businesses or processes are "broken".

Description: Shapiro 1990 documented some of the criteria used by actuaries when selecting the assumptions for actuarial valuations. He noted, however, that many of these criteria are often were in conflict with one another. This paper uses expected utility theory to model this process of choosing actuarial assumption when faced with potentially conflicting criteria. The three criteria considered are prudence, best estimate and conservativeness.

Description: This second article about ethical decision making for actuaries focuses on practical issues confronting ethical decision makers and offers some possible solutions.

Description: This article discusses the need to be self-aware of our development items, and to stretch ourselves to get better in the areas that we must develop.

Description: Although rate structures where low-cost cohorts subsidize high cost cohorts may be justified from a actuarial, marketing, or legal standpoint, the subsidization creates risks which must be understood and monitored. This article presents the concept of subsidization signature to measure and interpret the effects of rate subsidization, and to assess the sustainability of rating structures and the sensitivity of business mix assumptions.

Description: Risk and Rewards February 2014 Issue 63 Information Discovery and Knowledge Management: How Ebsco Can Help You Build Your Own Information Pyramid

Description: This article describes how we can choose to accept our setbacks in life and in our careers, or challenge ourselves to push through them.

Description: In the process of getting credentialed, there are more important things than a passing score. Life is not about numbers but transferable behaviors.

Description: This paper presents a generalization of the principal current methods of financial decision making. In the way physical sciences benefit from new general theories that encompass those theories they succeed, the science of finance can benefit from the development of a general framework that encompasses many of the current methods of financial analysis. The paper develops a general framework for financial decision-making from a few simple axioms of rational economic behavior.

Description: The author encourages the use of sound actuarial principles to develop reasonable retirement spending budgets instead of rule of thumb approaches commonly used.