Most insurers around the world have introduced some form of merit-rating
in automobile third party liability insurance. Such systems, penalizing
at-fault accidents by premium surcharges and rewarding claim-free years
by discounts, are called bonus-malus systems (BMS) in Europe and Asia.
With the current deregulation trends that concern most insurance markets
around the world, many companies will need to develop their own BMS. The
main objective of the book is to provide them models to design BMS that
meet their objectives.
Part I of the book contains an overall presentation of the pros and cons
of merit-rating, a case study and a review of the different probability
distributions that can be used to model the number of claims in an
automobile portfolio. In Part II, 30 systems from 22 different
countries, are evaluated and ranked according to their `toughness'
towards policyholders. Four tools are created to evaluate that toughness
and provide a tentative classification of all systems. Then, factor
analysis is used to aggregate and summarize the data, and provide a
final ranking of all systems. Part III is an up-to-date review of all
the probability models that have been proposed for the design of an
optimal BMS. The application of these models would enable the reader to
devise the system that is ideally suited to the behavior of the
policyholders of his own insurance company. Finally, Part IV analyses an
alternative to BMS; the introduction of a policy with a deductible.