The purpose of this paper is to reveal the relation between commutability of life annuities and retirees’ willingness to annuitize. To this end, we assume the existence of commutable life annuities, whose surrender charge is a proportion of their actuarial value. We model a retiree as a...

We find the minimum probability of lifetime ruin of an investor who can invest in a market with a risky and a riskless asset and who can purchase a commutable life annuity. The surrender charge of a life annuity is a proportion of its value. Ruin occurs when the total of the value of the risky...

We determine the optimal strategy for investing in a Black-Scholes market in order to maximize the probability that wealth at death meets a bequest goal $b$. We, thereby, make more objective the goal of maximizing expected utility of death, first considered in a continuous-time framework by...

We consider the problem of how an individual can use term life insurance to maximize the probability of reaching a given bequest goal, an important problem in financial planning. We assume that the individual buys instantaneous term life insurance with a premium payable continuously. By contrast...

We reveal an interesting convex duality relationship between two problems: (a) minimizing the probability of lifetime ruin when the rate of consumption is stochastic and when the individual can invest in a Black-Scholes financial market; (b) a controller-and-stopper problem, in which the...

We show that the mutual fund theorems of Merton (1971) extend to the problem of optimal investment to minimize the probability of lifetime ruin. We obtain two such theorems by considering a financial market both with and without a riskless asset for random consumption. The striking result is...

We establish when the two problems of minimizing a function of lifetime minimum wealth and of maximizing utility of lifetime consumption result in the same optimal investment strategy on a given open interval $O$ in wealth space. To answer this question, we equate the two investment strategies...

We develop a pricing rule for life insurance under stochastic mortality in an incomplete market by assuming that the insurance company requires compensation for its risk in the form of a pre-specified instantaneous Sharpe ratio. Our valuation formula satisfies a number of desirable properties,...