F. Etienne De Vylder - Böcker

This concise self-contained book on life contingencies is written for students, teachers, researchers and life insurance practitioners. The stochastic model, introduced by Professor De Vylder in the 1970s and now widely adopted, is used throughout the monograph. Beyond the classical material of life insurance mathematics, the emphasis lies on variance evaluations of mathematical reserves, allowing the estimation of long term ruin probabilities in life insurance portfolios with varying volume. Other characteristics of the book are its generality, the inclusion of an axiomatic theory of compound interests, the development of statistical methods for mortality and other estimations, and the introduction of graphs making a clear visualization of multiple decrement models possible. This approach makes the monograph incomparable to other books in the field.

This concise self-contained book on life contingencies is written for students, teachers, researchers and life insurance practitioners. The stochastic model, introduced by Professor De Vylder more than twenty years ago and now widely adopted, is used throughout the monograph. Beyond the classical material of life insurance mathematics, the emphasis lies on variance evaluations of mathematical reserves, allowing the estimation of long term ruin probabilities in life insurance portfolios with varying volume. Other characteristics of the book are its great generality, the inclusion of an axiomatic theory of compound interests, the development of statistical methods for mortality and other estimations, and the introduction of graphs making a clear visualization of multiple decrement models possible. This approach makes the monograph incomparable to other books in the field.

I am pleased to participate in this Summer School and look forward to sharing some ideas with you over the next few days. At the outset I would like to describe the approach I will take in 1 presenting the material. I aim to present the material in a non­ rigorous way and hopefully in an intuitive manner. At the same time I will draw attention to some of the major technical problems. It is pitched at someone who is unfamiliar with the area. The results presented here are unfamiliar to actuaries and insurance mathematicians although they are well known in some other fields. During the next few minutes I will make some preliminary comments. The purpose of these comments is to place the lectures in perspective and motivate the upcoming material. After this I will outline briefly the topics to be covered during the rest of this lecture and in the lectures that will follow. One of the central themes of these lectures is RISK-SHARING. Risk-sharing is a common response to uncertainty. Such uncertainty can arise from natural phenomena or social causes. One particular form of risk-sharing is the insurance mechanism. I will be dealing with models which have a natural application in the insurance area but they have been applied in other areas as well. In fact some of the paradigms to be discussed have the capacity to provide a unified treatment of problems in diverse fields.

In risk theory developed to describe insurance companies [1,2,3,4,5J, the ruin probability of a company with initial reserve (capital) u is 6 1 -:;-7;;f3 u 1jJ(u) = H6 e H6 (1) Here,we assume that claims arrive as a Poisson process, and the claim amount is distributed as exponential distribution with expectation liS.

I am pleased to participate in this Summer School and look forward to sharing some ideas with you over the next few days. At the outset I would like to describe the approach I will take in 1 presenting the material. I aim to present the material in a non­ rigorous way and hopefully in an intuitive manner. At the same time I will draw attention to some of the major technical problems. It is pitched at someone who is unfamiliar with the area. The results presented here are unfamiliar to actuaries and insurance mathematicians although they are well known in some other fields. During the next few minutes I will make some preliminary comments. The purpose of these comments is to place the lectures in perspective and motivate the upcoming material. After this I will outline briefly the topics to be covered during the rest of this lecture and in the lectures that will follow. One of the central themes of these lectures is RISK-SHARING. Risk-sharing is a common response to uncertainty. Such uncertainty can arise from natural phenomena or social causes. One particular form of risk-sharing is the insurance mechanism. I will be dealing with models which have a natural application in the insurance area but they have been applied in other areas as well. In fact some of the paradigms to be discussed have the capacity to provide a unified treatment of problems in diverse fields.