Comonotonic improvement under feasibility constraints

📅 2026-04-27
📈 Citations: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the issue of suboptimal, non-comonotonic risk sharing that arises when regulatory or contractual constraints undermine incentives for risk-averse agents. The paper introduces “quantile-convex order robustness” as a sufficient condition on the feasible set under which a comonotonic improvement exists for all preferences consistent with the convex order, thereby restoring the comonotonicity between Pareto-optimal allocations and aggregate losses. This condition encompasses common risk management constraints—such as value-at-risk (VaR) caps and individual deductibles—and is validated within the mean-variance framework. The result provides a unified and tractable theoretical foundation for constrained risk-sharing problems.

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📝 Abstract
Regulatory and contractual constraints on individual exposures are standard in insurance and reinsurance markets, but a poorly designed constraint can distort the economic incentives of risk-averse agents. In the unconstrained problem, the classical comonotonic improvement theorem guarantees Pareto-optimal allocations that are nondecreasing in the aggregate loss. A constraint that is not stable under risk reduction can destroy this property. We show by example that Value-at-Risk caps lead to optimal allocations that are non-comonotonic in the aggregate loss. We identify componentwise convex-order solidity as a sufficient condition on the feasible set that restores the comonotonic improvement under constraints. If replacing any agent's allocation by a less risky one preserves feasibility, then every feasible allocation admits a feasible comonotonic improvement for all convex-order-consistent preferences. This criterion covers many constraints typical in risk management, but excludes Value-at-Risk caps and idiosyncratic deductibles. We illustrate the implications of our main result in a mean-variance risk-sharing application.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

comonotonic improvement
feasibility constraints
risk sharing
Pareto optimality
convex order
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

comonotonic improvement
convex-order solidity
feasibility constraints
risk sharing
Value-at-Risk caps
C
Christopher Blier-Wong
Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada
J
Jean-Gabriel Lauzier
Department of Economics, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada