Description: The August/September 2013 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: Entry in the Speculative Fiction Contest 2019

Description: Entry in the Speculative Fiction Contest 2019

Description: Preview of the ICA meeting in Berlin.

Description: Behavioral economics is the alternative to the traditional ways (surveys and focus groups) we've been using to try to understand the drivers of customer behavior in the insurance industry. It merges psychology with traditional economic theory, offering insights into individual decision making behavior that go beyond the purely rational model. Within the sphere of health insurance, there are countless behaviors, not just of customers, but of underwriters, medical professionals and claims specialists which may be better explained by behavioral economics. Applying concepts from behavioral economics in live trials it is possible to bring about benefits such as increasing sales and retention rates, improving claims processing and encouraging more accurate disclosure. Swiss Re's global research team partners with its reinsurance clients to incorporate behavioral economics concepts into their letters, websites, forms and scripts by running A/B tests to understand what is driving customer behavior. The team currently has over 100 tests in progress with more than 40 clients, including many in the United States. The partnerships are producing clear business benefits, increasing sales, renewals, health disclosure and turnaround speed for claims payments. These changes are driven by small, inexpensive changes in communications with customers, and we'd like to share some of our insights with you. We've increased upsell rates, disclosure and email open rates, and reduced lapses, turnaround times and appointment no-show rates, to name just a few examples. Behavioral economics is the topic on everyone's lips with insurers and reinsurers all beginning to talk about it in earnest. Our team has been working hard for nearly 4 years and in that time instead of talking, we've been doing, and now we can share with you what a difference behavioral economics can actually make for insurance.

Description: Learn about key actuarial and analytic tools and methodologies used by commercial health insurance to identify and quantify drivers of healthcare cost and utilization (including wasteful and low-value ones) and risks. Use case scenarios in which these tools and methodologies apply, such as underwriting, reinsurance, medical management for population health and chronic diseases, managed care contracting, insurance market reform, provider payment reform, etc., will also be covered. Experience from the U.S., China and other parts of the world will be shared.

Description: The key tasks of credit risk capital project under CROSS II mainly focus onL(1 )Adjustment of measurement framework; (2) Calibration of risk factors, including both credit spread risk and credit default risk;3)Introduction of concentration risk measurement; (4) Higher requirement on look-through rule.

Description: A summary for the book club discussion on Ideal Team Player.

Description: Article describes best practices for teaching a course module that involves multiple parameters. A good example is hypothesis testing which requires consideration of the parameters, sample-size, population distribution, known variance and has as consequences whether a normal or t distribution should be used or whether non parametric methods are used. The articles recommends use of the Prime Implicant Normal Form as a means of teaching. It shows the superiority of this method over other forms such as heuristics, complete rules, or graduated approaches.

Description: A summary recap of the recent SOA Health Conference held in Dallas, TX in June of 2025. With the intentional use of AI to assist with the summary, this article gives a good overview of the recent conference with personal commentary from one of the attendees.