Equitable retirement income tontines: Mixing cohorts without discriminating

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel equitable retirement income tontine scheme that pools heterogeneous cohorts with differentiated share pricing, ensuring equitable income rights while addressing existence, uniqueness, and fairness issues.

Contribution

It generalizes the natural retirement income tontine by allowing mixed cohorts with share allocations based on age and investment, analyzing conditions for equitable construction.

Findings

Addresses existence and uniqueness of the scheme

Provides conditions for equitable pooling

Differentiates between equitable, fair, and optimal arrangements

Abstract

There is growing interest in the design of pension annuities that insure against idiosyncratic longevity risk while pooling and sharing systematic risk. This is partially motivated by the desire to reduce capital and reserve requirements while retaining the value of mortality credits; see for example Piggott, Valdez and Detzel (2005) or Donnelly, Guillen and Nielsen (2014). In this paper we generalize the natural retirement income tontine introduced by Milevsky and Salisbury (2015) by combining heterogeneous cohorts into one pool. We engineer this scheme by allocating tontine shares at either a premium or a discount to par based on both the age of the investor and the amount they invest. For example, a 55 year-old allocating $\$10,000$ to the tontine might be told to pay $\$$200 per share and receive 50 shares, while a 75 year-old allocating $\$8,000$ might pay $\$$40 per share and receive 200 shares. They would all be mixed together into the same tontine pool and each tontine share would have equal income rights. The current paper addresses existence and uniqueness issues and discusses the conditions under which this scheme can be constructed equitably -- which is distinct from fairly -- even though it isn't optimal for any cohort. As such, this also gives us the opportunity to compare and contrast various pooling schemes that have been proposed in the literature and to differentiate between arrangements that are socially equitable, vs. actuarially fair vs. economically optimal.