Felix Klein Colloquium: Suboptimal Controls in Some Insurance-Inspired Problems

We consider an insurance company modelling its surplus process by a Brownian motion with drift. In the first part of the talk, our target is to maximise the expected exponential utility of discounted dividend payments, given that the dividend rates are bounded by some constant. Numerical and theoretical considerations lead us to the conclusion that the optimal strategy must be of a non-trivial barrier type. Our approach estimates the distance between the performance function corresponding to a non-optimal (but easy-to-handle) strategy to the value function. In the second part, we look at several optimisation settings for an insurance company under the constraint that the terminal surplus at a deterministic and finite time T follows a normal distribution with given mean and variance. We show when one can find explicit expressions for the optimal strategies and the corresponding value functions. In addition, the cases when the optimal strategy is not identified, will be discussed and illustrated by examples.

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Julia Eisenberg, TU Wien

Time: 17:15 - 18:30 o'clock

Place: Building 48, room 210

The lectures of the Felix Klein Colloquium will be held at 17:15 in room 210 of the Mathematics Building 48. Beforehand - from 16:45 - there will be an opportunity to meet the speaker at the colloquium tea in room 580.