The credibility estimator has been successfully and widely applied by practitioners in the insurance industry for decades. However, an important issue remains unresolved: what sample size should the actuary choose when he/she applies the credibility estimator? In particular, is the size of a...

In the context of predicting future claims, a fully Bayesian analysis --- one that specifies a statistical model, prior distribution, and updates using Bayes's formula --- is often viewed as the gold-standard, while Buhlmann's credibility estimator serves as a simple approximation. But those...