Anti-Discrimination Insurance Pricing: Regulations, Fairness Criteria, and Models

54 Pages Posted: 24 May 2021 Last revised: 11 May 2023

See all articles by Xi Xin

Xi Xin

University of New South Wales (UNSW)

Fei Huang

UNSW Australia Business School, School of Risk & Actuarial Studies

Date Written: March 1, 2023

Abstract

On the issue of insurance discrimination, a grey area in regulation has resulted from the growing use of big data analytics by insurance companies – direct discrimination is prohibited, but indirect discrimination using proxies or more complex and opaque algorithms is not clearly specified or assessed. This phenomenon has recently attracted the attention of insurance regulators all over the world. Meanwhile, various fairness criteria have been proposed and flourished in the machine learning literature with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in the past decade, which mostly focus on classification decisions. In this paper, we introduce some fairness criteria that are potentially applicable to insurance pricing as a regression problem to the actuarial field, match them with different levels of potential and existing anti-discrimination regulations, and implement them into a series of existing and newly proposed anti-discrimination insurance pricing models, using both generalized linear models (GLMs) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). Our empirical analysis compares the outcome of different models via fairness-accuracy trade-off and shows their impact on adverse selection and solidarity.

Keywords: Indirect Discrimination, Fairness, AI, Big Data, Insurance Pricing

JEL Classification: G22

Suggested Citation

Xin, Xi and Huang, Fei, Anti-Discrimination Insurance Pricing: Regulations, Fairness Criteria, and Models (March 1, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3850420 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3850420

Xi Xin

University of New South Wales (UNSW) ( email )

High Street
Kensington
2052
Australia

Fei Huang (Contact Author)

UNSW Australia Business School, School of Risk & Actuarial Studies ( email )

Room 2058 South Wing 2nd Floor
Quadrangle building, Kensington Campus
Sydney, NSW 2052
Australia

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