The idea of insurance is that we all face risks that are unlikely but carry high cost. Think of a fire destroying your home. So we form a group to share the risk: we all pay a small amount, and the insurance policy pays a large amount to those few of us whose homes burn down. An insurance company looks at the records for millions of homeowners and sees that the mean loss from fire in a year is μ = $250 per house and that the standard deviation of the loss is σ = $1000. (The distribution of losses is extremely right-skewed: most people have $0 loss, but a few have large losses.) The company plans to sell fire insurance for $250 plus enough to cover its costs and profit. Explain clearly why it would be unwise to sell only 12 policies. Then explain why selling many thousands of such policies is a safe business.
The idea of insurance is that we all face risks that are unlikely but carry high cost. Think of a fire destroying your home. So we form a group to share the risk: we all pay a small amount, and the insurance policy pays a large amount to those few of us whose homes burn down. An insurance company looks at the records for millions of homeowners and sees that the mean loss from fire in a year is μ = $250 per house and that the standard deviation of the loss is σ = $1000. (The distribution of losses is extremely right-skewed: most people have $0 loss, but a few have large losses.) The company plans to sell fire insurance for $250 plus enough to cover its costs and profit. Explain clearly why it would be unwise to sell only 12 policies. Then explain why selling many thousands of such policies is a safe business.
The idea of insurance is that we all face risks that are unlikely but carry high cost. Think of a fire destroying your home. So we form a group to share the risk: we all pay a small amount, and the insurance policy pays a large amount to those few of us whose homes burn down. An insurance company looks at the records for millions of homeowners and sees that the mean loss from fire in a year is μ = $250 per house and that the standard deviation of the loss is σ = $1000. (The distribution of losses is extremely right-skewed: most people have $0 loss, but a few have large losses.) The company plans to sell fire insurance for $250 plus enough to cover its costs and profit. Explain clearly why it would be unwise to sell only 12 policies. Then explain why selling many thousands of such policies is a safe business.
5.28 Risks and insurance. The idea of insurance is that we all face risks that are unlikely but carry high cost. Think of a fire destroying your home. So we form a group to share the risk: we all pay a small amount, and the insurance policy pays a large amount to those few of us whose homes burn down. An insurance company looks at the records for millions of homeowners and sees that the mean loss from fire in a year is μ = $250 per house and that the standard deviation of the loss is σ = $1000. (The distribution of losses is extremely right-skewed: most people have $0 loss, but a few have large losses.) The company plans to sell fire insurance for $250 plus enough to cover its costs and profit.
Explain clearly why it would be unwise to sell only 12 policies. Then explain why selling many thousands of such policies is a safe business.
Definition Definition Measure of central tendency that is the average of a given data set. The mean value is evaluated as the quotient of the sum of all observations by the sample size. The mean, in contrast to a median, is affected by extreme values. Very large or very small values can distract the mean from the center of the data. Arithmetic mean: The most common type of mean is the arithmetic mean. It is evaluated using the formula: μ = 1 N ∑ i = 1 N x i Other types of means are the geometric mean, logarithmic mean, and harmonic mean. Geometric mean: The nth root of the product of n observations from a data set is defined as the geometric mean of the set: G = x 1 x 2 ... x n n Logarithmic mean: The difference of the natural logarithms of the two numbers, divided by the difference between the numbers is the logarithmic mean of the two numbers. The logarithmic mean is used particularly in heat transfer and mass transfer. ln x 2 − ln x 1 x 2 − x 1 Harmonic mean: The inverse of the arithmetic mean of the inverses of all the numbers in a data set is the harmonic mean of the data. 1 1 x 1 + 1 x 2 + ...
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