Harmful competition in insurance markets

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De Feo, Giuseppe and Hindriks, Jean (2014) Harmful competition in insurance markets. Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, 106. pp. 213-226. ISSN 0167-2681 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2014.06.002)

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Abstract

There is a general presumption that competition is a good thing. In this paper we show that competition in the insurance markets can be bad and that adverse selection is in general worse under competition than under monopoly. The reason is that monopoly can exploit its market power to relax incentive constraints by cross-subsidization between different risk types. Cream-skimming behavior, on the contrary, prevents competitive firms from using implicit transfers. In effect monopoly is shown to provide better coverage to those buying insurance but at the cost of limiting participation to insurance. Performing simulation for different distributions of risk, we find that monopoly in general performs (much) better than competition in terms of the realization of the gains from trade across all traders in equilibrium.

ORCID iDs

De Feo, Giuseppe ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2085-1756 and Hindriks, Jean;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)