Friday, 18 March 2016

Tariff Theory by Paavo Pitkanen, Finland

Introduction
            From International Risk Management Institute, tariff refers to rates and coverages set and published by the rating party with jurisdiction. The rating party may be moderated, and controlled either by a company association or a government body. When an insurance company accepts new insurance or there are changes in the premiums on earlier insurance due to renewal, the insurance company has to determine the factors that influence the premiums and calculate the premium according to the values of the factors. To do that, the company gathers data of the factors that eventually influence the amount of claims. Few general principles have to be fulfilled when the company calculates the tariff based on these data; the tariff has to be as correct as possible in relation to different risk groups. Next, the structure of tariff along with the calculation of the premium is quite straightforward. Thus, the factors influencing the tariff have to be few enough and its structure has to be simple, for example, linear or multiplicative function of the factors or rather easy to be expressed in tabular form. Normally, these principles are contradictory; if the premium is correct and accurate, the structure of the tariff is not simple.
Formulation of the problem
            As claims are contingent, we shall assume the total amount of claims on a certain risk period as random variable. To calculate the tariff, we will have to gather both qualitative and quantitative variables which may have an influence on the amount of claims. For example, in motor insurance, variables could be area where vehicle is driven, sex, engine’s stroke capacity, age of vehicle, etc.
1.      The selection problem
            From these possible risk variables, we must select the variables that have significant influence on the amount of claims, thus we will call them tariff variables or tariff factors. The most difficult part is choosing and specifying the tariff variables which have the significant influence and the values.
            If the structure of tariff is given, and the possible tariff variables are quantitative, the tariff variables can then be determine using the step-wise regression analysis, and it is also possible to calculate the tariff at the same time. The given tariff structure also naturally influences the selection of the tariff variables. A better procedure is try to select the tariff variables without any previous assumptions about the structure, then the objective is finding the best construction model, the parameters of which are decided according to several methods: least squares, Chi-Square minimum, modified Chi-Square and moment method.
            Next, we will look into the degree of influence in each possible tariff factors. For example, we expect more accidents will occur in winter than in summer, thus the risk in winter should be higher than summer, thus seasonality is has high degree of influence here.
            Lastly, the selection of tariff variables is done one by one. For each selection, the influence of the previous selected variables is taken into consideration. The most difficult part is measuring the significance of the influence of the different variables.
2.      Tariff construction problem
            Here, we have to calculate the premium as function of tariff variables chosen. To do this, we will first have to search for tariff factors and then construct the tariff. Research in tariff theory usually deals with this problem. The most common tariff models are multiplicative models or sum models.
Risk premium and collective premium
            After the selection problem had been solved, we can identify risks individually using the value tariff variables and combine these values together. According to Bühlmann’s practice, we can make several definitions:
i.                     The risk premium is the premium corresponding to the combination values of the tariff variables and thus defined for each value combination separately.
ii.                   The collective premium is the combine premium with calculation based on different value combination of the different tariff factors. In practice, using all of the tariff variables is usually deemed difficult. Correspondingly, if some of the variables can have many different values, it is preferable to classify the values into few classes where risks belonging to a certain class will have the same premium, which is the collective one. In practice, all insurance premiums can be considered as collective premiums, because not all tariff variables can be counted as factors influencing the premium. Thus, the collective premium depends on the distribution of unused tariff factors where if the distribution of these factors changed, the collective premium should be adjusted accordingly.
REFERENCE
11.       International Risk Management Institute. Insurance Glossary. Tariff. Retrieved 19th
22.       Paavo Pitkänen (1975). Tariff Theory. ASTIN Bulletin, 8, pp 204-228 doi:10.1017/
S0515036100009338  


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