Prioritizing Risk-level Factors in Comprehensive Automobile Insurance Management: A Hybrid Multi-criteria Decision-making Model

Abstract

An efficient risk-level prediction for newly proposed insurance policies plays a significant role in the survival of companies in the highly competitive insurance market. In Iran, risk assessment in comprehensive automobile insurance, which is a part of motor insurance, is only based on the vehicle attributes without proper consideration of personal and behavioural characteristics of driver(s). As a result, pricing is unfair in most of the cases and this can put insurance companies in an unfavourable financial position due to attracting high-risk drivers instead of low-risk ones. In this scenario, to identify and prioritize important factors affecting risk levels and to move towards a fair ratemaking, a two-phase process based on fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is proposed in this research. Additionally, similarity aggregation method (SAM) is applied to combine the individual fuzzy opinions of the surveyed experts into a group fuzzy consensus opinion. The results of this empirical study contribute to the insurance market of Iran by proposing appropriate weighting of the relevant risk factors to support stakeholders and policymakers for assessing risks more accurately, as well as designing more effective databases and insurance proposal forms.