Description: This article delves into a new line of statistical thinking of the author, that may be useful for product development actuaries. The key concept is how product design can produce products that diversify quickly, meaning that the company can be confident of a profitable product line, based on fewer sales than might be true for other designs.

Description: SOA Product Development Section Contest Winning Article. Contest was to provide a creative article on future technology for the life insurance industry.

Description: The science of behavioral economics explains shifts in social actions and behaviors. Behavioral economics studies how people actually behave in given circumstances—not what they did in the past or say they might do in the future, but how they are likely to behave now. It examines rational and irrational thought as well as unconscious motivations to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of consumer behavior. Could the insurance industry utilize behavioral economics as a way to potentially increase consumer desire to buy life insurance?

Description: This article is a submission to a Leadership Inspiration contest.

Description: In this session, panelists will lift the curtain on the main features of investment grade (IG) private placement bonds and below investment grade (BIG) private debt and compare them with available public bond and bank loan alternatives. The panel will examine the motivations for insurance companies and pension funds to invest in private debt and the legal, diligence and operational requirements to maintain a private debt portfolio. We will also conduct a 2017 private placement market review and look forward to 2018’s likely new USD and non-USD issuance and which industry sectors are likely to issue. This session will also cover their risk and reward characteristics, and the structural intricacies of the various IG and BIG debt types and whether there is sufficient compensation for illiquidity and other risks.

Description: This article is the first installment of a three-part series and is focused on providing an overview of LTC modeling approaches and considerations.

Description: This article presents a case study that examines the implication of using real-world interest rate scenario generators with a block of fixed deferred annuities. We contrast cash flow testing results based on New York 7 deterministic scenarios to stochastic scenarios generated with the Academy Interest Rate Generator , as well as an alternative economic scenario generator designed explicitly to capture the risk of a persistently low interest rate environment and the transition to a rising interest rate environment.

Description: This article describes a ranking system for early prisoner release. It is intended to describe the framework and strategy needed for mitigating the risk of such programs and optimizing those programs’ outcomes.

Description: After a summary of FASB decisions in their GAAP Targeted Improvements project, this article describes several issues that will need to be resolved either by the board or in actuarial practice and argues for seeking solutions that provide meaningful results without overly complicating valuation processes.

Description: This article discussed the NEAT family of neural network algorithms. NEAT automatically determines the number of hidden neurons, as well as their structure. Additionally HyperNEAT can scale to very large problem domains.