Benchmarks for the benchmark approach to valuing long-term insurance liabilities: comment on Fergusson & Platen (2023)

Abstract

This article comments on the paper “Less-expensive long-term annuities linked to mortality, cash and equity” by Kevin Fergusson and Eckard Platen, appearing in this issue of the Annals of Actuarial Science. It adds two perspectives to their thought-provoking contribution. The first is a similarity to some recent work in quantitative finance on “deep hedging” that leverages machine learning models to find the cheapest replication strategy for a derivative payoff in a largely model-free setting. The second perspective engages with some of the interesting implications of their approach and draws parallels to literature in asset pricing and macro-finance. These perspectives point to the potential need for more fundamental shifts than the authors of the paper are advertising.