• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.223-262
• /
• 1992

This paper develops a theory of the demand for insurance. The present model incorporates insurance demand time value of insurance premium, and demand for listless and risky assets simultaneously within the expected utility framework. For a special case of CARA, an insurance decision can be made separately from other portfolio decisions. However, in general, the interactions of both decisions cannot be ignored even when insurable and speculative risks are stochastically independent. In particular, the role of risky investment in hedging insurable risk is demonstrated and it is shown that this role cannot be duplicated by an insurance contract. When the investment decision is made simultaneously with the insurance decision, some of the classic theory on insurance should be modified. As an example, the authors characterize the sufficient conditions, under which the Bernoulli criteria (without and with premium loadings) hold or are violated in terms of the net gain of risky investment, the net cost of insurance, and the stochastic relationship between insurable and speculative risks. The authors interpret the results using the Rothschild and Stiglitz's (1970) notion of 'increase in riskiness'.