On a Class of Optimal Reinsurance Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shyamalkumar, N. D., Wang, Tianrun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Shyamalkumar, N. D.
Wang, Tianrun
author_facet Shyamalkumar, N. D.
Wang, Tianrun
contents De Finetti's optimal reinsurance is a set of contracts, one for each risk in a portfolio, that caps the retained aggregate variance to a pre-specified level while minimizing total expected loss. The premiums are determined using the expected value principle, and the safety loading is allowed to vary with the risks. The original formulation assumed that the risks were independent and restricted contracts to quota shares on individual risks. A recent variation surprisingly yields a closed form for the contracts, while allowing dependence between risks and permitting the contracts to depend on all risks, without restricting their functional form. We extend this to the case of an arbitrary convex functional as the risk measure and use duality tools from convex analysis to show the equivalence between the constrained and the penalized versions of the underlying optimization problem. To explicitly solve the penalized version for the variance and the conditional value at risk (CVaR) as the risk measure, we resort to either variational analysis or a rudimentary approach. We show that a rudimentary approach can also address the choice of VaR, a non-convex functional, as the risk measure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00813
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On a Class of Optimal Reinsurance Problems
Shyamalkumar, N. D.
Wang, Tianrun
Optimization and Control
91G05 (Primary) 91G70, 90C25 (Secondary)
De Finetti's optimal reinsurance is a set of contracts, one for each risk in a portfolio, that caps the retained aggregate variance to a pre-specified level while minimizing total expected loss. The premiums are determined using the expected value principle, and the safety loading is allowed to vary with the risks. The original formulation assumed that the risks were independent and restricted contracts to quota shares on individual risks. A recent variation surprisingly yields a closed form for the contracts, while allowing dependence between risks and permitting the contracts to depend on all risks, without restricting their functional form. We extend this to the case of an arbitrary convex functional as the risk measure and use duality tools from convex analysis to show the equivalence between the constrained and the penalized versions of the underlying optimization problem. To explicitly solve the penalized version for the variance and the conditional value at risk (CVaR) as the risk measure, we resort to either variational analysis or a rudimentary approach. We show that a rudimentary approach can also address the choice of VaR, a non-convex functional, as the risk measure.
title On a Class of Optimal Reinsurance Problems
topic Optimization and Control
91G05 (Primary) 91G70, 90C25 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00813