The case deals with ethical issues in marketing in a larger context encountered while managing channels. Freedom AV Life Insurance, established in 2002, was a laggard in terms of revenue generation ...among private life insurers in the country. A new CEO, Ramesh Ramachandran, was hired to improve revenues, which drastically improved post his joining and upon on him hiring a new sales head. However, customer grievances multiplied, and Rajesh Bhardwaj, the customer services head, was questioned by the CEO and was asked to submit an action plan to stem the rising complaints. Bhardwaj felt this was the result of mis-selling by agents and the salesforce of the company. Bhardwaj proposed a solution by emailing the sales head. Just as he had finished writing the mail, he was surprised to find a new mail from the CEO asking him to prepare a presentation before the company’s board of directors in two days. At the end of the case, Bhardwaj becomes engulfed with self-doubt and anxiety on what to present before the board members. The case deals with ethical issues in marketing financial products like life insurance and looks at solutions to the practice of mis-selling financial services. Students would attempt to find answers to the question of whether they can achieve sales goals without resorting to unethical practices.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the valuation of equity-linked death benefit contracts and the multiple life insurance on two heads based on a joint survival model. Using the exponential ...Wiener process assumption for the stock price process and a Ksub.n distribution for the time until death, we provide explicit formulas for the expectation of the discounted payment of the guaranteed minimum death benefit products, and we derive closed expressions for some options and numerical illustrations. We investigate multiple life insurance based on a joint survival using the bivariate Sarmanov distribution with Ksub.n (i.e., the Laplace transform of their density function is a ratio of two polynomials of degree at most) marginal distributions. We present analytical results of the joint-life status.
This study has been undertaken in order to estimate the impact on IRDA guidelines on customer satisfaction in the life insurance sector from the time of its inception in 1999 to the IRDA Amendment ...(The Insurance Laws Act) of 2015. In order to accomplish the research aim and objectives appropriately, a thematic framework has been implemented that aspires to conduct quantitative analysis of the primary data collected in relation to the research topic through questionnaire-based survey. Further, comparative survey of customer confidence on IRDA guidelines pertaining to pre- and post-IRDA regulation 2017 has been made in the study. The study findings confirm that IRDA guidelines, that is, transparent and make clear specifications on aggressive online selling by insurance companies, provide outsourcing guideline for them, direct the customers on timely settlement of claims without delay, and are abided by the mandate of Government of India to link PAN and Aadhaar card of the consumers to their policies show significantly positive impact on consumer confidence. Simply put, there is significant increase in confidence post-2015 Amendment Act.
This study applies the dynamic slack-based measure (DSBM) model to evaluate the performance of 34 Chinese life insurance companies for the period 2006–2010. This study also examines the relationship ...between intellectual capital and performance using the truncated regression approach. Our findings indicate that over the period of the study, the mean efficiency scores of life insurers are relatively stable, ranging from 0.905 to 0.973. We verify that the efficiency scores of the DSBM model differ significantly from those of the traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, which supports the use of the DSBM model. Our regression analysis reveals that intellectual capitals are significantly positively associated with firm operating efficiency. Our findings corroborate prior studies which show that intellectual capital can make a company rich. In this dynamic business world, life insurers' managers should invest and fully utilize intellectual capital to gain a competitive advantage.
•We utilize the dynamic slack-based measure (DSBM) model.•We evaluate changes in operating performance of Chinese life insurers over long-term periods.•Considering carry-over activities could lead to more accurate efficiency estimation.•We use the truncated regression with bootstrapping approach. We also present Tobit regression and robust cluster regression.•Intellectual capital has positive impacts on operating efficiency for Chinese life insurers.
We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal ...health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to explain the observed variation in health and mortality delta implied by the ownership of life insurance, annuities including private pensions, and long-term care insurance in the Health and Retirement Study. For the median household aged 51 to 57, the lifetime welfare cost of market incompleteness and suboptimal choice is 3.2% of total wealth.
We conduct a series of field experiments to evaluate the quality of advice provided by life insurance agents in India. Agents overwhelmingly recommend unsuitable, strictly dominated products that ...provide high commissions to the agent. Agents cater to the beliefs of uninformed consumers, even when those beliefs are wrong. We also find that agents appear to focus on maximizing the amount of premiums (and therefore their commissions) that customers pay, as opposed to focusing on how much insurance coverage customers need. A natural experiment requiring disclosure of commissions for a specific product results in agents recommending alternative products with high commissions but no disclosure requirement. A follow-up agent survey sheds light on the extent to which poor advice reflects both the commission incentives and agents’ limited product knowledge.
PDF
