English

DTIC ADA088596: Models in Insurance: Paradigms, Puzzles, Communications and Revolutions.

Every scientific community reveals its shared beliefs and values, its great achievements and persistent problems, and its current state-of-the-art and evolutionary future through its model-building activity and its scientific communications. To survey and comprehend the field of actuarial science, then, one must examine, classify, and comment upon the basic paradigms -- the accepted concepts-models-puzzles-solutions -- that are revealed in the literature of risk and insurance theory. This paper attempts such a survey, based upon the communications submitted to Topic 1 of the 21st ICA, 'Generalized Models of the Insurance Business,' and upon a selected portion of the explosive numbers of papers and books which have appeared in the open literature in the last decade. Clearly, many of the basic paradigms are still in a state of flux, as new ideas and methods, in many cases imported from other disciplines, have begun to compete with previously accepted paradigms, causing, in some cases, displacements of methodology and minor revolutions in conceptual approach.

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