Behaviour in insurance coverage

The international insurance industry is very large and involves trillions of euros in transactions each year. However, the evidence that many people participate in this market should not convey the idea that this participation is always efficient and based on conscious behaviour. Emerging neuroeconomic evidence suggests that insurance decisions are often reflexive, and thus impacted simultaneously by logical and emotional processes. Sometimes, people buy insurance coverage as holding a policy can also bring emotional gains. This book, therefore, tries to shed some light on what drives insurance demand. The analysis examines insurance decisions through the lenses of both theoretical and empirical studies; it also proposes some novel evidence on real-life insurance purchasing taking a variety of personality and psycho-physiological traits into consideration. This book should be of interest for insurers, who should strive to learn all they can about factors that motivate customers to purchase, for regulators, who must create a protective framework that is consistent with actual consumer behaviour, but also for individuals, in order to increase the self-consciousness of their actions.