Researchers from Taiwan, Germany and the US recently united at the University of Guelph to share knowledge on a subject that impacts us all: insurance.

Led by economics professor Mike Hoy, who holds a research fellowship from the College of Business and Economics in Management of Risk and Knowledge, attendees of the Workshop on Risk and Insurance Issues explored topics ranging from the solvency of life insurance companies to preferential treatment by auto insurance providers towards hybrid vehicle drivers.

According to Hoy, the researchers engaged in a lot of discussion about misperception, which is a part of behavioural economics. One presentation focused on CEO behaviour and how overconfident use of stock options can be a misleading indicator of how a company is really performing.

“It would seem that CEOs who exercise more of their stock options are obviously more confident that the company is going to do well,” said Hoy. “If that were based on a rational assessment, they would be right. If based on overconfidence, those companies aren’t doing better than the others.”

Events like this workshop give academics an additional and more informal opportunity to engage in knowledge sharing. According to Hoy, it was also a “great demonstration of the research and programs happening in different parts of the world.”

Hoy’s own research focuses on the relationship between insurance companies and genetic testing. In 2012, he co-wrote a report [1] (with Maureen Durnin) for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada that asked if insurance companies should be allowed access to genetic testing results in order to gauge pricing. It is a key societal issue that, according to Hoy, needs to “find balance”.

In addition to being the College’s research fellow in Management of Risk and Knowledge, Hoy also acts as the co-editor of the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, a bi-annual international journal that provides a forum for the exchange of academic findings and views on all aspects of risk and insurance economics.
 

Workshop on Risk and Insurance Issues 
Attendees & Topics

CEO Overconfidence, Performance, and Risk Taking: Evidence from U.S. Publicly Traded Property-Liability Insurance Companies
Gene Lai, Department of Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, Washington State University, USA

Generating Economic Scenarios for the Long-Term Solvency of Life Insurance Companies: The Orthogonal ARMA-GARCH Approach
Ming-Hua Hsieh, Department of Risk Management and Insurance, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Chenghsien Tsai, Department of Risk Management and Insurance, National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Eco-friendly Green Drivers are Indeed Friendly Drivers
Kili C. Wang, Department of Insurance, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Experimental Estimation of the Preference Parameters in Almost Stochastic Dominance
Rachel J. Huang, Department of Finance, National Central University, Taiwan

Competitive Insurance Markets Under Asymmetric Information When Agents Make Mistakes
Richard Peter, Institute for Risk Management and Insurance, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany

Regulation and Shadow Banking
Eric Stephens, Department of Economics, University of Carleton, Canada