The optimal reinsurance strategy with price-competition between two reinsurers

TL;DR

This paper models the strategic interactions in reinsurance markets with two reinsurers competing on prices, using a stochastic game framework to derive equilibrium strategies and analyze market dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a Stackelberg game with a Nash competition between reinsurers, incorporating different premium principles and solving a time-inconsistent control problem.

Findings

Unique equilibrium reinsurance premium strategy for exponential claims

Reinsurance strategies depend on claim size, risk aversion, and interest rates

Numerical results illustrate the impact of market parameters on strategies

Abstract

We study optimal reinsurance in the framework of stochastic game theory, in which there is an insurer and two reinsurers. A Stackelberg model is established to analyze the non-cooperative relationship between the insurer and reinsurers, where the insurer is considered as the follower and the reinsurers are considered as the leaders. The insurer is a price taker who determines reinsurance demand in the reinsurance market, while the reinsurers can price the reinsurance treaties. Our contribution is to use a Nash game to describe the price-competition between two reinsurers. We assume that one of the reinsurers adopts the variance premium principle and the other adopts the expected value premium principle. The insurer and the reinsurers aim to maximize their respective mean-variance cost functions which lead to a time-inconsistency control problem. To overcome the time-inconsistency issue in the game, we formulate the optimization problem of each player as an embedded game and solve it via a corresponding extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. We find that the insurer will sign propositional and excess loss reinsurance strategies with reinsurer 1 and reinsurer 2, respectively. When the claim size follows exponential distribution, there exists a unique equilibrium reinsurance premium strategy. Our numerical analysis verifies the impact of claim size, risk aversion and interest rates of the insurer and reinsurers on equilibrium reinsurance strategy and premium strategy, which can help to understand competition in the reinsurance market