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Full-Text Articles in Business

Insurance And Enterprise: Cyber Insurance For Ransomware, Tom Baker, Anja Shortland Dec 2022

Insurance And Enterprise: Cyber Insurance For Ransomware, Tom Baker, Anja Shortland

All Faculty Scholarship

Selling insurance gives insurers an incentive to manage insured risks. The “insurance as governance” literature demonstrates that insurers often make insurance conditional on ex ante risk reduction or mitigation. But insurance governs in support of enterprise, not security for its own sake. Tight underwriting inhibits enterprise – not only for insured businesses but also the business of insurance. This paper highlights ex post loss reduction as a form of insurance-based governance. Drawing on interviews with industry insiders, we explore how insurers addressed the evolving problems of moral hazard, uncertainty, and correlated losses since the 1990s. We find that cyber insurance …


Third Party Moral Hazard And The Problem Of Insurance Externalities, Gideon Parchomovsky, Peter Siegelman Jan 2022

Third Party Moral Hazard And The Problem Of Insurance Externalities, Gideon Parchomovsky, Peter Siegelman

All Faculty Scholarship

Insurance can lead to loss or claim-creation not just by insureds themselves, but also by uninsured third parties. These externalities—which we term “third party moral hazard”—arise because insurance creates opportunities both to extract rents and to recover for otherwise unrecoverable losses. Using examples from health, automobile, kidnap, and liability insurance, we demonstrate that the phenomenon is widespread and important, and that the downsides of insurance are greater than previously believed. We explain the economic, social and psychological reasons for this phenomenon, and propose policy responses. Contract-based methods that are traditionally used to control first-party moral hazard can be welfare-reducing in …