Academic Papers – Snippets

Academic Papers – Snippets

• 1900-1959
  • 1944 –Insurance Crimes, Alfred Manes, (Criminology)
    • “The record of life insurance frauds reads like fiction.”

• 1970-1979
  • 1972 – An Empirical Investigation of Attitudes Toward Life Insurance Product, Price and Promotion. Odies Collins (OC) Ferrell, Jr., , (Marketing)
    • “Research conducted by the Institute of Life Insurance indicates that consumers view life insurance as a necessity, but the purchase of life insurance produces more consumer discontent than is generated in most other product fields.”

• 1980-1989
  • 1980 – Models in Insurance: Paradigms, Puzzles, Communications and Revolutions, William S. Jewell, (Operations Research)
    • “As I read through the 42 papers offered on this topic, I became somewhat uneasy at the variety and divergence of the concepts and models presented, and this feeling was only heightened when I began to reflect upon the many and varied papers and textbooks in insurance and risk theory which have appeared in the past decade.”
    • “What could a physicist-engineer-operations researcher who has not had extensive actuarial practice hope to add to this topic, which is central to the profession?”

• • 1981 – The NAIC Model Life Insurance Solicitation Regulation: Measuring the Consumer Impact in New Jersey, Roger A. Formisano
    • “This paper examines, via consumer interview, the impact of the National Association of Insurance Commissioner’s Model Life Insurance Solicitation < Disclosure> Regulation as implemented in New Jersey.”
  • 1982 – Using Information-Processing Principles in Public Policymaking, Michael B. Mazis and Richard Staelin
    • “However, surveys have shown that the model life insurance cost disclosure format adopted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) is incomprehensible to the average consumer, although it was designed to facilitate better understanding of Life Insurance costs.”
    • “The need to consider the target recipients’ capacity to understand the information is illustrated by a recent study of six- and eight-year-olds. Children were exposed to toy commercials with either a standard dis- claimer used by the industry (“some assembly required”), or a modified one (“you have to put it together”). Not surprisingly, the children who were told “you have to put it together” showed greater understanding of the meaning of the message than the ones exposed to the “some assembly required” dis- claimer (Adler et al. 1977)

• 1990-1999
  • 1994 – The Dynamics of Managing a Life Insurance Company,  (Systems Dynamics Thinking)
    • “This paper reports the findings of an internal McKinsey research and development project designed to test the value of applying System Dynamics thinking to the life insurance industry. The aim was to understand better how management decisions and actions can affect the success or failure of a typical direct sales life company.”
  • 1996 – Early Interactions between the Life Insurance and Computer Industries: The Prudential’s Edmund Berkeley and The Society of Actuaries Committee, 1946-1952, JoAnne Yates
    • “…shows how pioneers in life insurance, including the Prudential’s early computer expert and proselytizer Edmund C. Berkeley and a broader industry effort by a special committee of the Society of Actuaries, viewed computer technology and their potential use of it, as well as the ways in which they influenced its development.”

• •  

• 2000-2009
  • 2000 – The Nature and Causes of Variation in Insurance Policy Yields: Whole Life and Universal Life,- 18p,  James M. Carson and Mark D. Forster
    • “The analysis provides information on the nature, extent, and causes of variation in policy performance, both within and across policy type.
  • 2004 – Universal Life Insurance – Aspects of the Cash Value Development, Martin Birkenheier
    • “Compared to whole life policies, it <Cash Value> even gains more importance as it is the main source to provide for the flexibility of the product.”

• 2010-2019
• • 201x – Universal Life Insurance Duration Measures, Alonzi, Lange, Simpkins
    • “Created during the early 1980’s, the original UL Life Insurance product calculated premiums based on reduced current mortality rate assumptions and historically high current interest rates. This resulted in significantly lower premiums relative to Traditional Cash Value Insurance.
  • 2013 – Behavioral Economics and Insurance Law: The Importance of Equilibrium Analysis, Tom Baker and Peter Siegelman
    • “Economists have formalized the insurance companies’ information problems and, in the process, developed what has come to be known as the economics of information.”