Stochastic Claims Reserving Methods in Insurance

It is astonishing that the methods used for claims reserving in non life insurance are, even still today, driven by a deterministic understanding of one or several computational algorithms. Stochastic Claims Reserving Methods in Insurance is tremendously widening this traditional understanding. In this text reserving is model driven, computational algorithms become a consequence of the chosen model. Only with this approach it makes sense to ask how predicted reserves might vary. Stochastic reserving is hence the corner stone of successful risk management for the technical result of an insurance company. Mario Wüthrich and Michael Merz have to be congratulated for opening the eyes of the non life actuary to a new and modern dimension. Hans Bühlmann, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich Assessing the best estimate of insurance liabilities and modelling their adverse developments are among the new frontiers of insurance under the new IAS and the proposed new solvency regimes. This book makes a leap towards these frontiers. The variegated issue of predicting outstanding loss liabilities in non life insurance is addressed using the unified framework of theory of stochastic processes. The proposed approach provides valuable tools for tackling one of the most challenging forecasting problems in insurance. Franco Moriconi, Professor of Finance, University of Perugia