When a party seeks to pass a risk to another in a market transaction it typically must first provide information about the risk to the potential risk bearer, who determines whether to accept the risk and if so at what price. In the current paper, we examine the demand for underwriting and its...

Much of the extensive empirical literature on insurance markets has focused on whether adverse selection can be detected. Once detected, however, there has been little attempt to quantify its importance. We start by showing theoretically that the efficiency cost of adverse selection cannot be...

This paper tests for asymmetric information in the U.K. annuity market of the 1990s by trying to identify 'unused observables,' attributes of individual insurance buyers that are correlated both with subsequent claims experience and with insurance demand but that insurance companies did not use...

This paper tests for asymmetric information in the U.K. annuity market of the 1990s by trying to identify 'unused observables,' attributes of individual insurance buyers that are correlated both with subsequent claims experience and with insurance demand but that insurance companies did not use...

We prove the existence of an equilibrium in competitive markets with adverse selection in the sense of Miyazaki (1977), Wilson (1977), and Spence (1978) when the distribution of unobservable risk types is continuous. Our proof leverages the finite-type proof in Spence (1978) and a limiting...

Given that the insurance market is characterized by asymmetric information, its efficiency has traditionally been based to a large extent on risk classification. In certain regulations, however, we can find restrictions on these differentiations, primarily the ban on those considered to be...