Many public goods like dams, fire departments, and lighthouses do not provide direct utility but act more as insurance devices against floods, fire, and shipwreck. They either diminish the probability or the size of the loss. We extend the public good model with this insurance aspect and generalize Samuelson’s efficient allocation rule when self-insurance and self-protection expenditures are pu...

Large insurance losses happen infrequently, but they happen. In this paper we present the standard distribution models used in fire, wind–storm or flood insurance. We also present the classical Cramér-Lundberg model for the total claim amount and some more recent extensions. The classical insurance risk measure is the ruin probability and we give a full account of the ruin event in such models....

The insurance and risk management industries are typically considered to have little interest in energy issues, other than those associated with large energy supply systems. The historical involvement of these industries in the development and deployment of familiar loss-prevention technologies such as automobile air bags, fire prevention/suppression systems, and anti-theft devices, evidences a...

The assessment of the reliability of concrete structures during fire is becoming increasingly important due to the emergence of performance based design codes, the increased interest in decision making with respect to life time optimization of infrastructure, and the direct applicability of reliability calculations for insurance purposes. Most recent studies on the topic of the probabilistic ca...