English

Incentive Pareto Efficiency in Monopoly Insurance Markets with Adverse Selection

Theoretical Economics 2026-02-11 v1 Risk Management

Abstract

We study a monopolistic insurance market with hidden information, where the agent's type θ\theta is private information that is unobservable to the insurer, and it is drawn from a continuum of types. The hidden type affects both the loss distribution and the risk attitude of the agent. Within this framework, we show that a menu of contracts is incentive efficient if and only if it maximizes social welfare, subject to incentive compatibility and individual rationality constraints. This equivalence holds for general concave utility functionals. In the special case of Yaari Dual Utility, we provide a semi-explicit characterization of optimal incentive-efficient menus of contracts. We do this under two different settings: (i) the first assumes that types are ordered in a way such that larger values of θ\theta correspond to more risk-averse types who face stochastically larger losses; whereas (ii) the second assumes that larger values of θ\theta correspond to less risk-averse types who face stochastically larger losses. In both settings, the structure of optimal incentive-efficient menus of contracts depends on the level of the social welfare weight. Moreover, at the optimum, higher types receive greater coverage in exchange for higher premia. Additionally, optimal menus leave the lowest type indifferent, with the insurer absorbing all surplus from the lowest type; and they exhibit efficiency at the top, that is, the highest type receives full coverage.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.09967,
  title  = {Incentive Pareto Efficiency in Monopoly Insurance Markets with Adverse Selection},
  author = {Maria Andraos and Mario Ghossoub},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.09967},
  year   = {2026}
}