Description: Explores the open vs. closed systems debate with regards to actuarial modeling and exposes the over-simplification. Valuable for anyone who uses models.

Description: It is worth the effort to obtain a pricing surface. It helps make an informed decision and facilitate the pricing conversation within and outside a company.

Description: In this paper we propose a model that can be used to analyze correlated claims data. In the process we introduce a class of multivariate generalized Poisson distributions. Then we present posterior distributions of its parameters. These distributions are difficult to manipulate, so we employ Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to draw random numbers from posteriors and predictive distributions. We present a collection of EXCEL VBA functions and subroutines to perform the simulations.