Insurers have the reputation of being bad payers who nitpick whenever an opportunity arises. However, this nitpicking activity has a positive impact on their auditing strategy since auditing may prove profitable when claims are not fraudulent. We show that reducing the indemnity payments of...

We survey recent developments in the economic analysis of insurance fraud. The paper first sets out the two main approaches to insurance fraud that have been developped in the literature, namely the costly state verification and the costly state falsification. Under costly state verification,...

Insurance fraud is a major source of inefficiency in insurance markets. A self-justification of fraudulent behavior is that insurers are bad payers who start nitpicking if an opportunity arises, even in circum- stances where the good-faith of policyholders is not in dispute. We relate this...

This article makes a bridge between the theory of optimal auditing and the scoring methodology in an asymmetric information setting. Our application is meant for insurance claims fraud, but it can be applied to many other activities that use the scoring approach. Fraud signals are classified...