Description: Investment Fallacies: The Fable of the Storyteller and the Market

Description: Actuaries should understand the economic considerations involved in the formulary drug decision-making process, and the presence of actuarial input in the process could improve it, especially by tying it to overall decision making for the health plan. From Prescription Drugs Monograph, M-HB04-1.

Description: The ORSA should be more than a compliance requirement -- its process should be an integral element of a company's governance and risk and strategic planning process used by both management and the board on a regular feedback loop basis. Similar to that used for ERM, it along with a carefully constructed set of metrics should serve as the springboard to be used to identify, control and mitigate short- and long-term risks, as well as to enable exploitation of opportunities to add shareholder and policyholder value. Risk can represent an opportunity from which insurers can leverage their knowledge and risk management capabilities to find and maintain a competitive edge. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: Results of a survey to examine the various changes life insurance companies have recently made, or are thinking of making, to improve the new business process.

Description: The paper o ers a simple framework for ranking the common reinsurance struc- tures in practice with the theory of stochastic orders. The basic idea is to slice the space of reinsurance structures into groups by expected loss cost to facilitate the comparisons within the group and between groups. Given the standard risk aversion assumption in economics, a spectrum of reinsurance structures with the same expected loss cost can be compared analytically with one another and sequenced based on their risk coverages under the convex order. The paper then expands the dimension of the comparison to groups of reinsurance structures with di erent expected loss costs, which can be ranked under the increasing convex order and the usual stochastic order. As such, the paper maps out the ordering for the entire space of reinsurance structures and presents it in a ma- trix format for quick reference. The implication of this stochastic ordering to reinsurance pricing is also investigated.

Description: Provides the actuary with a more satisfactory basis for annuity premiums and reserves. It presents a new mortality basis and offers a description of its construction. It also provides a historical review of past mortality tables for annuities. From the Society of Actuaries 50th Anniversary Monograph, M-AV99-1.

Description: Matrix decomposition techniques are used to find main features of a dataset. These features can be used to describe the data or to find clusters of objects. The decompositions have problems when the matrices have missing data or are from different exposures. This article examines the issue and some papers dealing with it.

Description: Discussion of insolvency provision added to reinsurance agreements to insure the continuation of benefits during HMO insolvency, Issue No. 39.

Description: Article discusses what happends when an insurer fails, role of the guaranty association and what is an ideal insolvency. From Health Section News, August 2000, Issue No. 38.

Description: Implications of the Final Health Privacy Rule HIPAA with regards to underwriting, renewing, rating, reserving, reinsurance and acquisitions. Issue No. 40.