Katja Trümpler

Although catastrophe bonds are continuing to gain importance in today's risk transfer and capital markets, little is known about the decision-making processes that drive the demand for this aspiring asset class. In the paper at hand, we focus on one segment of the investing community. Our main research goal is to identify major determinants of the cat bond investment decision of insurance and reinsurance companies. For this purpose, we have conducted a comprehensive survey among senior executives in the European insurance industry. Evaluating the resulting data set by means of exploratory factor analysis and logistic regression methodology, we are able to show that the expertise and experience with regard to cat bonds, the perceived fit of the instrument with the prevailing asset and liability management strategy, as well as the applicable regulatory regime are significant drivers of an insurer's propensity to invest. These statistical findings are supported by further qualitative survey results and additional information from structured interviews with the investment managers of four large dedicated cat bond funds.

Insurance claims fraud is counted among the major concerns in the insurance industry, the reason being that excess payments due to fraudulent claims account for a large percentage of the total payments each year. We formulate optimization problems from the insurance company as well as the policyholder perspective based on a costly state verification approach. In this setting—while the policyholder observes his losses privately—the insurance company can decide to verify the truthfulness of incoming claims at some cost. We show simulation results illustrating the agreement range which is characterized by all valid fraud and auditing probability combinations both stakeholders are willing to accept. Furthermore, we present the impact of different valid probability combinations on the insurance company’s and the policyholder’s objective quantities and analyze the sensitivity of the agreement range with respect to a relevant input parameter. This contribution summarizes the major findings of a working paper written by Müller et al. (Working Papers on Risk Management and Insurance (IVW-HSG), No. 92, 2011).

Insurance claims fraud is counted among the major concerns in the insur- ance industry, the reason being that excess payments due to fraudulent claims ac- count for a large percentage of the total payments each year. We formulate optimiza- tion problems from the insurance company as well as the policyholder perspective based on a costly state verification approach. In this setting-while the policyholder observes his losses privately-the insurance company can decide to verify the truth- fulness of incoming claims at some cost. We show simulation results illustrating the agreement range which is characterized by all valid fraud and auditing probability combinations both stakeholders are willing to accept. Furthermore, we present the impact of different valid probability combinations on the insurance company's and the policyholder's objective quantities and analyze the sensitivity of the agreement range with respect to a relevant input parameter. This contribution summarizes the major findings of a working paper written by Müller et al. (Working Papers on Risk Management and Insurance (IVW-HSG), No. 92, 2011).