Complimentary return-freight insurance serves the dark side: An innovative online return policy in China

E-commerce is a typical form of retail digitalization that introduces online uncertainty and product returns.To decrease the negative influence of online uncertainty,the largest Chinese e-commerce company,the Alibaba Group,invited an insurance company to develop return-freight insurance(RFI),a new kind of insurance,to compensate for consumers'losses in the event of online product returns.Complimentary RFl can increase consumer confidence in the retailer and attract more demand.Retailers who offer complimentary RFI demonstrate to consumers that their products and services are too good to incur excessive product returns.However,some low-quality online retailers can mimic competitors'behavior by offering complimentary RFI to consumers.This study aims to introduce an innovative online return policy based on RFI and to explore whether lowquality online retailers would use complimentary RFI as their return strategy to mislead consumers.Using signaling theory,we built a conceptual economic model that includes three exogenous pricing variables:RF,insurance premium,and compensation.These variables play different roles in the model because consumers cannot observe the insurance premium,but the compensation can be.The main finding of this study is that innovative complimentary RFI could be abused by low-type retailers when the premium and compensation are appropriate.Interestingly,compensation plays different roles for retailers with different product values:low-type retailers use complimentary RFI as a noise tool.When the product works for the consumer and the insurance profit is not too high,the compensation for the low-quality product should be larger than that for the highquality product,which is different from conventional wisdom.Although high-type online retailers may use complimentary RFl as a product quality signal,there is still a significant risk that nefarious elements will use it to create product quality noise.

Analysis of Drug Medical Insurance Access Pricing Based on the Perspective of Binary Equilibrium

Objective To study the influencing factors in the process of national medical insurance negotiation and drug pricing from the dualistic equilibrium perspective,and to provide reference for the harmonious management of drug pricing in China.Methods Through the literature analysis and policy review,the pricing subject,pricing basis and price control system in the pricing process of medical-accessed medicines were analyzed from the perspective of binary equilibrium and harmonious management.Results and Conclusion It is found that four balances in the drug pricing process,two balances in pricing basis and three balances in price control system need to be considered,respectively.Drug pricing is the key content of national medical insurance access,which is also the hotspot of the policy in the pharmaceutical fields in recent years.Drug pricing not only reflects the value of drugs,but also reflects a lot of top-level designs of binary equilibriums in medical insurance policy.While the rational design of drug pricing requires the joint efforts of the government,pharmaceutical companies and relevant experts to comprehensively consider many equilibriums,so as to improve the relevant systems.

A Market Model of Risk Transfer and Insurance

We introduce a model of a market where risk-averse consumers pay a fee to transfer their future losses to one or more firms.The future loss of each consumer is stochastic with a unique,known mean and variance.The law of large numbers allows the firms to know with certainty the expected aggregate loss of the consumers to whom they sell.The model could describe the behavior of agents in the market for property insurance where an insurance company sells a single type of policy to a specific group of consumers based upon the expected losses of those consumers and their willingness to pay for coverage.The model demonstrates how a single firm can choose the optimal segment of the market to which they sell a policy and how that choice might change when the distribution of consumers and their risk aversion changes.The model also demonstrates how two firms might engage in a cooperative strategy and share the market.The model shows how a firm entering the market will find it more advantageous to target a segment of the market with consumers that have a lower expected loss.

Optimal Pricing and Return-Freight Insurance:Strategic Analysis of E-Sellers in the Presence of Reputation Differentiation

Motivated by the practice that e-sellers cooperate with insurance companies to offer consumers the return-freight insurance(RI),this paper aims to investigate the competing e-sellers’RI strategies.Regarding the information asymmetry in the online context,reputation system is widely applied by e-platforms.In an online market with two competing e-sellers that sell the same product but are differentiated in their reputation,this paper builds an analytical model to explore the e-sellers optimal pricing and RI strategies.Combined with sellers’reputation and their RI strategies,the equilibrium outcomes under four cases are discussed.This paper reveals the conditions that e-sellers are willing to offer RI.Specifically,the findings demonstrate that low reputation e-seller is more likely to offer RI.Moreover,when the sellers are more divergent,they are more likely to co-exist in the market.Insurance premium and RI compensation play critical roles in their decisions.RI introduction tends to increase the price,thus offsets the benefits of RI,but does not affect the total consumer surplus.

Assessing the Impact of Health Insurance on Household Financial Protection in Togo

Context: To facilitate financial access to care for the population, health insurance mechanisms have been established, in particular the National Health Insurance Institute, which covers civil servants and their dependents. In addition, other voluntary and community mechanisms have been developed. After several years of implementation, the level of catastrophic health expenditures among insured individuals shows that there is still a considerable level of financial risk associated with health care. This study aims to assess the impact of health insurance in Togo on insured populations. Methodology: The data used in this study come from the harmonized survey on household living conditions carried out in 2018 by the National Institute of Statistics, Economic and Demographic Studies. The propensity score matching method was used according to the following steps: estimation of propensity scores, verification of the conditional independence hypothesis (balancing property) and estimation of the average treatment effect on treated. Stata V14.2 software was used. Findings: The average effect of health insurance on household financial protection is −0.012 for the nearest neighbor method, −0.013 for the matching radius method, −0.015 for the Kernel and −0.016 for the stratification method. Results showed that health insurance contributes to reducing catastrophic health expenditures, but their effect remains very limited. This could be explained by the level of care package covered and the cost covered. Conclusion: Health insurance contributes to the reduction of catastrophic health expenses for households. However, it is important to widen the range of care covered and the cost covered. In addition, measures to extend this coverage to a larger proportion of the population will make it possible to have a greater impact.

Are life insurance futures a safe haven during COVID‑19?

This study aims to examine whether life insurance futures can serve as a hedge against the COVID-19 pandemic and whether they have the characteristics of a safe haven under the impact of the health shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic.We chose three life insurance stock futures in India and one in Taiwan as samples,including the market index of the two countries and the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases as sample variables.We used the growth rate of COVID-19 cases as the threshold variable,esti-mated the asymmetric threshold vector autoregression model,and found that insur-ance futures in the regime with a significant growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases can hedge against COVID-19 risks;therefore,insurance futures are a safe haven for the market.We further estimated the time-varying parameter vector autoregression model,and the impulse response results showed that insurance futures are a safe haven for COVID-19 pandemic risks.

The Potential of Commercial Pension Insurance to Develop into One of the Pillars of Rural Pension Insurance:A Study from the Demand Perspective

The development of a multi-pillar pension insurance system is an effective solution for an aging society.Commercial pension insurance,as the third pillar of pension insurance,is an integral part of this system in China and can play a critical and complementary role in rural areas where support for the elderly is a more pressing concern and a second pillar of pension insurance remains absent.To this end,we first elaborate on the theoretical logic that commercial pension insurance can develop into one of the pillars of rural pension insurance.We then empirically test rural residents’willingness to participate in a commercial pension insurance plan(CPIP)in a probit model with household research data from rural areas in major labor-exporting provinces,such as Sichuan and Henan so as to explore whether commercial pension insurance has the potential to become one of the pillars of rural pension insurance.Our research findings can be synthesized in three points.First,rural residents out of agricultural production for five consecutive years are more willing to participate in a CPIP than other rural residents,indicating that progress in industrialization and urbanization can significantly boost such willingness.Second,the younger rural residents are more inclined to participate in a CPIP than the older generation.Third,income increases can significantly boost rural residents’willingness to participate in a CPIP.Thus,with progress in industrialization and urbanization and an increase in rural disposable income,commercial pension insurance has a promising potential in rural areas and can hopefully develop into one of the pillars of rural pension insurance.

Impact of Dialysis Coverage on the Provision of Universal Health Insurance in the Republic of the Congo

Introduction: The launch of health insurance in the Republic of the Congo took place against a backdrop of extremely high costs for dialysis, which was not one of the services financed within this framework. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of including dialysis in the health insurance package in Congo. Methodology: This is a descriptive cross-sectional study with an evaluative aim, analyzing the impact of dialysis on the financing capacity of health insurance and health facilities to provide this type of care. Results: The results show that including dialysis in the universal health insurance package will require an additional financial effort of 6.20% of the current total financing capacity of the care basket. Most dialysis sessions are provided by the private health sector (87.5%), whose health facilities are unevenly distributed across the country, and concentrated in the country’s two major cities. This problem is the dual consequence of the very high cost of a dialysis session (average cost 140,234,375 FCFA or 229 US Dollars) and the number of patients under care, which will increase in the absence of effective and ongoing prevention efforts against chronic diseases in general and end-stage renal failure in particular. Conclusion: Dialysis is a high-impact public health intervention. The impact of its inclusion in the universal health insurance care package is difficult to bear financially. For dialysis to be covered by universal health insurance, additional funding and improved technical facilities are needed.

Explainable AI and Interpretable Model for Insurance Premium Prediction

Traditional machine learning metrics(TMLMs)are quite useful for the current research work precision,recall,accuracy,MSE and RMSE.Not enough for a practitioner to be confident about the performance and dependability of innovative interpretable model 85%–92%.We included in the prediction process,machine learning models(MLMs)with greater than 99%accuracy with a sensitivity of 95%–98%and specifically in the database.We need to explain the model to domain specialists through the MLMs.Human-understandable explanations in addition to ML professionals must establish trust in the prediction of our model.This is achieved by creating a model-independent,locally accurate explanation set that makes it better than the primary model.As we know that human interaction with machine learning systems on this model’s interpretability is more crucial.For supporting set validations in model selection insurance premium prediction.In this study,we proposed the use of the(LIME and SHAP)approach to understand research properly and explain a model developed using random forest regression to predict insurance premiums.The SHAP algorithm’s drawback,as seen in our experiments,is its lengthy computing time—to produce the findings,it must compute every possible combination.In addition,the experiments conducted were intended to focus on the model’s interpretability and explain its ability using LIME and SHAP,not the insurance premium charge prediction.Three experiments were conducted through experiment,one was to interpret the random forest regression model using LIME techniques.In experiment 2,we used the SHAP technique to interpret the model insurance premium prediction(IPP).

Inspiration of Foreign Innovative Drug Pricing Methods and Medical Insurance Payment Standards to China

Objective To study the innovative drug pricing methods and medical insurance payment standards in foreign countries and to provide reference for China’s government.Methods The official websites were searched for information and related literature,and literature review was used.Results and Conclusion In foreign countries,the clinical value of innovative drugs and their impact on medical insurance funds were comprehensively evaluated based on factors such as quality-adjusted life years,clinical benefit,and improvement of clinical benefit.Then,the evaluation results were taken as an important basis for whether innovative drugs were admitted to the medical insurance catalog and establishing medical insurance payment standards.By using international experience for reference,innovative drug pricing methods and medical insurance payment standards for China’s national conditions can be improved by establishing a basic database of clinical value and drug economic evaluation of innovative drugs,as well as innovative drug payment models based on decision thresholds.

The Impact of Population Aging on the Expenditure of Medical Insurance Fund for Urban Workers in China

Objective To explore the impact of population aging on the expenditures of medical insurance funds against the background that great changes in population structure influences economic development.Methods Through analyzing the impact of the population aging,the income and accumulated balance of the medical insurance fund,and other related factors on the expenditure of the medical insurance fund,development status of the medical insurance fund for urban employees in China since 2003 was obtained.Stata 16.0 was used to perform multiple linear regression analysis on related factors to determine the correlation between population aging and the change in medical insurance expenditures.Results and Conclusion The factors that have a greater impact on the expenditure of the medical insurance fund are the amount of income from the medical insurance,followed by the number of people over the age of 65 in China and the urban retired employees participating in medical insurance.We should focus on the sustainable development of the urban employee medical insurance fund to deal with the threat of aging.

Research on Accounting Issues of the Pension Insurance Fund for Urban Employees

Pension insurance is a vital component of China's social security system,ensuring the welfare of the general publie.This study centers on the revenue and expenses of City S's urban employee basic pension insurance fund.It introduces and analyzes the fund's accounting status from four key perspectives:fund raising.expenditure,financial statement system,and accounting information disclosure.The research identifes existing problems in City S's accounting system and conducts in-depth research on these issues.Furthermore,an empirical analysis is conducted on the management of the pension insurance fund.Through this empirical study,the paper aims to offer insights and recommendations for promoting stable and healthy development measures for City S'8 urban employee basic pension insurance fund.

微管注入PS与INSURE技术治疗早产儿RDS的临床效果评价

目的探讨微管注入肺表面活性物质(PS)技术与气管插管-PS给药-拔管(INSURE)技术治疗≥30周早产儿呼吸窘迫综合征(RDS)的临床效果。方法选取RDS早产儿80例,按随机数表法分为观察、对照2组各40例。对照组采用INSURE技术,观察组采用微管注入(LISA)技术给与PS治疗。比较2组临床疗效、血气指标(PaO_(2)、PaCO_(2)和pH值)、脑血流动力学参数(PSV、EDV和RI)、临床相关指标和出院前病死率及并发症发生率。结果观察组患儿疗效高于对照组(P<0.05)。观察组患儿治疗后PaO_(2)、pH值均高于对照组,PaCO_(2)低于对照组(P<0.05)。2组患儿T0~T3时PSV、EDV、RI水平比较差异无统计学意义(P>0.05)。观察组患儿氧疗时间、插管用时均短于对照组(P<0.05);2组无创通气时间、住院时间及出院前病死率比较差异无统计学意义(P>0.05)。2组患儿治疗期间并发症发生率比较差异无统计学意义(P>0.05)。结论LISA和INSURE技术给予PS技术治疗早产儿RDS,可显著提高临床疗效,改善患儿血气指标。

INSURE策略治疗早产儿呼吸窘迫综合征失败的危险因素分析

新生儿呼吸窘迫综合征(RDS)是因缺少肺泡表面活性物质(PS),导致新生儿肺发育不成熟,引起呼吸功能障碍的严重肺部疾病~([1])。该疾病多发于胎龄在34周以下的早产儿,主要症状为呼吸困难逐渐加重等,严重影响患儿生命健康,具有较高的病死率~([2])。

Farmers using insurance and cooperatives to manage agricultural risks: A case study of the swine industry in China

Purchasing agricultural insurance and joining agricultural cooperatives are two prevalent instruments used by farmers in China for dealing with agricultural risks. Data from 443 swine farmers in Jiangsu and Henan provinces of China were collected. Factors affecting the farmers’ decision to purchase agricultural insurance and join agricultural cooperatives were assessed. The possibility of simultaneous use of both instruments and the potential correlation between these two decisions was considered as well. Results showed that the farmers’ decision to use agricultural insurance and cooperatives was positively correlated, indicating that farmers who purchased agricultural insurance which mainly used to mitigate production risks were more likely to join agricultural cooperatives which more used to share market risks, and vice versa. Farmers’ knowledge of swine insurance and trust in the local government positively impacted the purchase of agricultural insurance, while education, years involved in swine production and scale of swine production positively impacted farmers joining agricultural cooperatives.

Engineering models for catastrophe risk and their application to insurance

Internationally earthquake insurance,like all other insurance (fire,auto),adopted actuarial approach in the past, which is,based on historical loss experience to determine insurance rate.Due to the fact that earthquake is a rare event with severe consequence,irrational determination of premium rate and lack of understanding scale of potential loss led to many insurance companies insolvent after Northridge earthquake in 1994. Along with recent advances in earth science,computer science and engineering,computerized loss estimation methodologies based on first principles have been developed to the point that losses from destructive earthquakes can be quantified with reasonable accuracy using scientific modeling techniques. This paper intends to introduce how engineering models can assist to quantify earthquake risk and how insurance industry can use this information to manage their risk in the United States and abroad.

Farmers' Perception and Awareness and Factors Affecting Awareness of Farmers Regarding Crop Insurance as a Risk Coping Mechanism Evidence from Pakistan

This study has been conducted in three districts of Punjab Province namely, Dera Ghazi Khan, Rajan Pur and Bahawalpur of Pakistan. The study showed the results of a survey of 300 farmers which was organized to assess awareness level of farmers regarding crop insurance, factors affecting the awareness level among farmers and the perception of farmers about crop insurance. Based on exploratory research work upon the responses of farmers, the average and standard deviation were calculated. Probit model was applied to explore the factors affecting the awareness level of farmers. SPSS was used for the analysis of the collected data. The results revealed that out of 300 farmers, 184 farmers were aware with crop insurance and rests of the 116 farmers were not aware. Banks and E-media were found to be the two most important sources of the awareness for the respondent farmers. In the study area, the climatic risks were reported as the most severe risks faced by the farmers. The results also revealed the existence of negative perceptions of the farmers about crop insurance i.e. farmers perceived crop insurance as a kind of tax and they believed premium was so high that it was out of range of poor farmers and only large scale farmers could afford it. Results obtained by applying Probit model revealed that ＂education＂ and ＂previously availed agricultural credit＂ were the two most important factors which affected the awareness of the farmers regarding crop insurance.

Potato farmers’ preference for agricultural insurance in China: An investigation using the choice experimental method

Potato insurance plays an important role in transferring agricultural risks to promote the potato staple strategy. Understanding farmers’ real preferences for potato insurance attributes is important to improve the potato insurance. In this study, a choice experiment was designed with attributes such as peril, minimum compensation ratio for production loss, types of crops covered by insurance, annual premium per mu after subsidy, and complexity of claims procedures. We constructed a mixed logit model based on a questionnaire survey of 362 potato farmers’ choices of insurance attributes from 24 villages in Dingxi City of Gansu Province using random sampling. The results show that:(1) farmers prefer agricultural insurance with widely perils including output price drop and input cost risk;(2) farmers who have suffered plant disease and insect and pest damage are willing to pay a high premium for the insurance with a high compensation ratio and several types of crops covered;full-time farmers and large-scale farmers preferred insurance products with low complexity of claims procedures. Therefore, new potato insurance design could be considered specifically for different farmer groups such as those who had previous disaster experiences, and large-or small-scale farm operations.

Is the “One Province One Rate” premium policy reasonable for Chinese crop insurance? The case in Jilin Province

Crop insurance in China is currently adopting the premium pricing strategy of "One Province One Rate", which appears to be in line with the systematic risk characteristics within crop insurance. This research aims to investigate the theoretical rationalization of this pricing strategy and its implications using the spatial lag model and the county-level data from the 45 corn plant counties of Jilin Province, China. Results corroborate that:(1) the spatial spillover effect of the corn yield risk is significant in Jilin but decreases rapidly when the risk unit includes more than eight counties; and(2) separating Jilin Province into eight risk zones for corn insurance will significantly reduce the high cross-subsidy phenomenon arising from the "One Province One Rate" strategy and shall benefit poor peasants in the region as well. This paper not only proves the existence of a systematic risk of crop insurance but also reveals that the spatial correlation and systemic features of the crop yield risk do not create a solid foundation for the current pricing strategy of "One Province One Rate". These conclusions will undoubtedly provide important references and empirical evidence for the role of China’s crop insurance in poverty alleviation.

Crop Insurance, Premium Subsidy and Agricultural Output

This paper studied the effects of crop insurance on agricultural output with an economic growth model. Based on Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans （RCK） model, a basic model of agriculture economic growth was developed. Extending the basic model to incorporate uncertainty and insurance mechanism, a risk model and a risk-insurance model were built to study the inlfuences of risk and crop insurance on agricultural output. Compared with the steady states of the three models, the following results are achieved：（i） agricultural output decreases if we introduce uncertainty into the risk-free model;（ii） crop insurance promotes agriculture economic growth if insurance mechanism is introduced into the risk model;（iii） premium subsidy constantly improves agricultural output. Our contribution is that we studied the effects of crop insurance and premium subsidy from the perspective of economic growth in a dynamic framework, and proved the output promotion of crop insurance theoretically.