Loan pricing under estimation risk

Abstract Financial product prices often depend on unknown parameters. Their estimation introduces the risk that a better informed counterparty may strategically pick mispriced products. Understanding estimation risk, and how to properly price it, is essential. We discuss how total estimation risk can be minimized by selecting a probability model of appropriate complexity. We show that conditional estimation risk can be measured only if the probability model predictions have little bias. We illustrate how a premium for conditional estimation risk may be determined when one counterparty is better informed than the other, but a market collapse is to be avoided, using a simple example from pricing regime credit scoring. We empirically examine the approach on a panel data set from a German credit bureau, where we also study dynamic dependencies such as prior rating migrations and defaults.