Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-11-2020
Abstract
We investigate the cost of legal restrictions on experience rating in auto and home insurance. The cost is an opportunity cost as experience rating can mitigate the problems associated with unobserved heterogeneity in claim risk, including mispriced coverage and resulting demand distortions. We assess this cost through a counterfactual analysis in which we explore how risk predictions, premiums, and demand in home insurance and two lines of auto insurance would respond to unrestricted multiline experience rating. Using claims data from a large sample of households, we first estimate the variance-covariance matrix of unobserved heterogeneity in claim risk. We then show that conditioning on claims experience leads to material refinements of predicted claim rates. Lastly, we assess how the households’ demand for coverage would respond to multiline experience rating. We find that the demand response would be large.
Publication Citation
Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, Darcy Steeg Morris & Joshua C. Teitelbaum, The Cost of Legal Restrictions on Experience Rating, 17 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 38 (2020).
Scholarly Commons Citation
Barseghyan, Levon; Molinari, Francesca; Morris, Darcy Steeg; and Teitelbaum, Joshua C., "The Cost of Legal Restrictions on Experience Rating" (2020). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 1127.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1127