IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/pseptp/hal-00756620.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Competitive Insurance Markets and Adverse Selection in the Lab

Author

Listed:
  • Dorra Riahi
  • Louis Lévy-Garboua

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Claude Montmarquette

    (CIRANO - Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche en ANalyse des Organisations)

Abstract

We provide an experimental analysis of competitive insurance markets with adverse selection. Our parameterized version of the lemons' model (Akerlof 1970) in the insurance context predicts total crowding out of low-risks when insurers offer a single full insurance contract .The therapy proposed by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) consists of adding a partial insurance contract so as to obtain selfselection of risks. We test the theoretical predictions of these two models in two experiments. A clean test is obtained by matching the parameters of these experiments and by controlling for the risk neutrality of insurers and the common risk aversion of their clients by means of the binary lottery procedure. The results reveal a partial crowding out of low risks in the first experiment. Crowding out is not eliminated in the second experiment and it is not even significantly reduced. Finally, instead of the predicted separating equilibrium, we find pooling equilibria. The latter can be sustained because insureds who objectively differ in their risk level do not perceive themselves as being so much different.

Suggested Citation

  • Dorra Riahi & Louis Lévy-Garboua & Claude Montmarquette, 2013. "Competitive Insurance Markets and Adverse Selection in the Lab," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) hal-00756620, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:hal-00756620
    DOI: 10.1057/grir.2012.5
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00756620
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dengov, V. & Melnikova, E., 2013. "Adverse selection in various insurance markets and the ways to deal with it (the experience of practical research)," Annals of marketing-mba, Department of Marketing, Marketing MBA (RSconsult), vol. 2, July.
    2. Bardey, David & De Donder, Philippe & Mantilla, César, 2019. "How is the trade-off between adverse selection and discrimination risk affected by genetic testing? Theory and experiment," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    3. Johannes G. Jaspersen, 2016. "Hypothetical Surveys And Experimental Studies Of Insurance Demand: A Review," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 83(1), pages 217-255, January.
    4. Johannes G. Jaspersen & Marc A. Ragin & Justin R. Sydnor, 2022. "Insurance demand experiments: Comparing crowdworking to the lab," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 89(4), pages 1077-1107, December.
    5. Jean-François Outreville, 2014. "The Meaning of Risk? Insights from The Geneva Risk and Insurance Review," The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan;The Geneva Association, vol. 39(4), pages 768-781, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    experimental economics; insurance markets; adverse selection; binary lottery procedure; expected utility;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:hal-00756620. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Caroline Bauer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.