Risk Classification in Insurance Markets with Risk and Preference Heterogeneity
研究了消费者在风险和风险偏好上存在私人信息的竞争性保险市场，刻画了均衡特征，并分析了风险分类信号披露的福利效应以及人口风险分布变化的影响。
Abstract This paper studies a competitive model of insurance markets in which consumers are privately informed about their risk and risk preferences. We provide a characterization of the equilibria, which depend non-trivially on consumers’ type distribution, a desirable feature for policy analysis. The use of consumer characteristics for risk classification is modeled as the disclosure of a public informative signal. A novel property of signals, monotonicity, is shown to be necessary and sufficient for their release to be welfare improving for almost all consumer types. We also study the effect of changes to the risk distribution in the population as the result of demographic changes or policy interventions. We show that an increase in the risk distribution, according to the monotone likelihood ratio ordering of distribution, leads to lower utility for almost all consumer types. In contrast, the effect is ambiguous when considering the first-order stochastic dominance ordering.