Actuarial Science as a Scientific Discipline: The Next Step, British Actuarial Journal

In consecutive guest editorials for the British Actuarial Journal (BAJ ), Jed Frees and Harry Panjer discussed the importance of scientific journals in actuarial science, and praised the recent emergence of new peer reviewed journals such as the BAJ (1995), the North American Actuarial Journal (NAAJ, 1997), and now the Annals of Actuarial Science. These positive developments reflect the remarkable expansion of actuarial science as an academic discipline, leading to the submission of hundreds of articles annually. Long gone are the days when the creation of a new journal led editors to worry that “too many journals would be chasing too few papers’’. In 1998, Insurance: Mathematics and Economics (IME) increased its annual number of issues from 4 to 6

Cooperative Game Theory and its Insurance Applications

This survey paper presents the basic concepts of cooperative game theory, at an elementary level. Five examples, including three insurance applications, are progressively developed throughout the paper. The characteristic function, the core, the stable sets, the Shapley value, the Nash and Kalai-Smorodinsky solutions are defined and computed for the different examples

The Effect of Firearm Deaths on Life Expectancy and Insurance Premiums in the United States

Despite recent gains, the U.S. remains behind most other affluent countries in life expectancy. Even within the U.S., the gap between the life expectancies of Caucasians and African-Americans remains significant. At the same time, firearm deaths in the U.S. far exceed peer nations, and disproportionately affect African-American males. In this Issue Brief, Dr. Lemaire explores whether deaths from firearms explain some of these international and racial disparities in life expectancy. He uses actuarial techniques to calculate the “cost” of firearm deaths in the U.S., both in terms of reduced life expectancy and increased life insurance premiums

The Cost of Firearm Deaths in the United States: Reduced Life Expectancies and Increased Insurance Costs

The United States remains far behind most other affluent countries in terms of life expectancy. One of the possible causes of this life expectancy gap is the widespread availability of firearms and the resulting high number of U.S. firearm fatalities: 10,801 homicides in 2000. The European Union experienced 1,260 homicides, Japan only 22. Using multiple decrement techniques, I show that firearm violence shortens the life of an average American by 104 days (151 days for white males, 362 days for black males). Among all fatal injuries, only motor vehicle accidents have a stronger effect. I estimate that the elimination of all firearm deaths in the United States would increase the male life expectancy more than the total eradication of all colon and prostate cancers. My results suggest that the insurance premium increases paid by Americans as a result of firearm violence are probably of the same order of magnitude as the total medical costs due to gunshots or the increased cost of administering the criminal justice system due to gun crime

Why Do Females Live Longer Than Males?

In most countries, females live several years longer than males. Many biological and behavioral reasons have been presented in the scientific literature to explain this “female advantage.” A cross-sectional regression study, using 45 explanatory variables and data collected from 169 countries, provides support to the behavioral hypothesis. Four variables, unrelated to biological sex differences, explain over 61% of the variability of the life expectancy differential. One variable (the number of persons per physician) summarizes the degree of economic development of a country. The three other selected variables (the fertility rate, the percentage of Hindus and Buddhists, and Europeans countries of the former Soviet Union) are social/cultural/religious variables. This conclusion is slightly weakened when the presence of spatial autocorrelation in the data is specifically acknowledged

Formation of hydroxylamine on dust grains via ammonia oxidation

The quest to detect prebiotic molecules in space, notably amino acids, requires an understanding of the chemistry involving nitrogen atoms. Hydroxylamine (NH$_2$OH) is considered a precursor to the amino acid glycine. Although not yet detected, NH$_2$OH is considered a likely target of detection with ALMA. We report on an experimental investigation of the formation of hydroxylamine on an amorphous silicate surface via the oxidation of ammonia. The experimental data are then fed into a simulation of the formation of NH$_2$OH in dense cloud conditions. On ices at 14 K and with a modest activation energy barrier, NH$_2$OH is found to be formed with an abundance that never falls below a factor 10 with respect to NH$_3$. Suggestions of conditions for future observations are provided.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

A Comparative Analysis of 30 Bonus-Malus Systems

The automobile third party insurance merit-rating systems of 22 countries are simulated and compared, using as main tools the stationary average premium level, the variability of the policyholders\u27 payments, their elasticity with respect to the claim frequency, and the magnitude of the hunger for bonus. Principal components analysis is used to define an “Index of Toughness” for all systems

Tolerance analysis approach based on the classification of uncertainty (aleatory / epistemic)

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in tolerance analysis problem. This paper deals with tolerance analysis formulation, more particularly, with the uncertainty which is necessary to take into account into the foundation of this formulation. It presents: a brief view of the uncertainty classification: Aleatory uncertainty comes from the inherent uncertain nature and phenomena, and epistemic uncertainty comes from the lack of knowledge, a formulation of the tolerance analysis problem based on this classification, its development: Aleatory uncertainty is modeled by probability distributions while epistemic uncertainty is modeled by intervals; Monte Carlo simulation is employed for probabilistic analysis while nonlinear optimization is used for interval analysis.“AHTOLA” project (ANR-11- MONU-013

Looking for reconciliations between anecdotes and causalities: The stoical model

Our bias in establishing causality ties which attribute to one consequence a unique cause make circular causality difficult as a way of thinking. Philosophy shows many theories about causality which all are ways to reduce anxiety. Our experiences sometimes require us to go farther than the instrumental (causal) level and to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction. The Stoical model of expressive causality gives a different meaning to our work. In practice the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chair of expressive causalities. A clinical example shows how the anecdote can be the intersection between the family and therapist, offering a new dimension to circular causality and helps the therapist to understand and create another way of thinking about disorder and confusion. © 1991 Human Sciences Press, Inc

Le lemme fondamental pour l'endoscopie tordue: le cas où le groupe endoscopique non ramifié est un tore

We prove the fundamental lemma for twisted endoscopy, for the unit elements of the spherical Hecke algebras, in the case of a non ramified elliptic endo- scopic datum whose underlying group is a torus. This implies that the fundamental lemma for twisted endoscopy is now proved, for all elements in the spherical Hecke algebras, in characteristic zero and any residue characteristic