Export Credit Insurance: Author's Reply
回应Eeckhoudt和Louberge对出口信用保险的分析，讨论政府机构采用非比例赔付方法时使用线性保费率的三个理由，包括信息成本高和避免道德风险。
Eeckhoudt and Louberge [1] (hereafter, E-L) provided a valuable analysis on the working of export credit insurance in which a government agency employs the non-proportional reimbursement method. In Funatsu [2], a premium rate per dollar of coverage was assumed to be constant with both proportional and non-proportional reimbursement methods.' Although an optimal amount of coverage is the objective of an exporting firm in both cases, the actuarially fair price per dollar of coverage differs according to the type of the reimbursement method. The fair premium is nonlinear to the level of coverage with the non-proportional method while it is linear with the proportional method. I agree with Professors Eeckhoudt and Louberge on the point that the use of everywhere fair premium schedules for the non-proportional method yields results consistent with standard theorems in the theory of demand for insurance. However, in the context of export credit insurance, one can still argue that a government agency may well utilize linear pricing with the non-proportional reimbursement method. Therefore, results on the non-proportional case in my article are not totally useless. I would like to discuss three reasons in favor of a constant premium rate by utilizing some new insights gained from E-L. Firstly, it may not be feasible for a government agency to formulate a precise fair premium schedule. As one can see from Equation (3) in E-L, knowledge of the entire distribution function of a partial loss rate a is required rather than an expected value of ao. It is simply too costly for a government agency to collect all the necessary information. Secondly and most importantly, even if the objective formulation of a fair schedule is feasible, a government agency may not want an exporting firm to take full coverage in order to avoid the moral hazard problem. In the present context, the problem is interpreted as the reduction of the possible self-protective activities in the process of shipments due to the presence of fully covered insurance. In general, partial coverage makes an exporting firm