Ecologists have concluded that diversity per se in ecosystems is important to ecosystem function and ecological services. Meta-analyses of several hundred investigations showed that a loss of diversity negatively affected ecosystem function (Balvanera et al., 2006; Cardinale et al., 2006, 2011; Tilman, 2012). Specifically, research showed that loss of species diversity decreased productivity, r...

There is a vital dialectic between agency and surrender in life and in the analytic process. Without an ability to will, one cannot choose one’s actions; one becomes a passive victim of circumstances rather than an agent who can influence one’s own destiny. On the other hand, an exaggerated sense of agency fails to take into account the limits of our ability to control life, and is associated w...

In this paper we raise the matter of considering a stochastic modeling of the surrender rate instead of the classical S-shaped deterministic curve (in function of the spread), still used in almost all insurance companies. A stochastic model in which surrenders are conditionally independent with respect to a S-curve disturbance would be tempting in some extreme scenarii, especially to address th...

Abstract We perform a detailed theoretical study of the value class participating policies with four key features: (i) policyholder is guaranteed minimum interest rate on policy reserve; (ii) contract can be terminated by holder at any time until maturity (surrender option); (iii) (or upon surrender), bonus credited to if portfolio backing outperforms current (iv) due solvency requirements, end...

This paper shows that some policy features are crucial to explain the decision of the policyholder to surrender her contract. We point it out by applying two segmentation models to a life insurance portfolio : the Logistic Regression model and the Classification And Regression Trees model. Protection as well as Savings lines of business are impacted, and results clearly explicit that the profit...

Surrender poses one of the major risks to life insurance and a sound modeling its true probability has direct implication on risk capital demanded by Solvency II directive. We add existing literature performing extensive experiments that present highly practical results for various approaches, including XGBoost, random forest, GLM neural networks. Further, we detect shortcomings prevalent model...

Should the IS field relinquish its identity and surrender to the social, political and economic forces that are placing IS scholars outside of traditional IS departments and programs? Should IS scholars mesh into competing departments (e.g., marketing and accounting) and schools (e.g., information studies and engineering) instead of seeking placement in a traditional IS department? By touting I...