Concurrency is central to the “firmness” of a traditional firm order terms (FOT) process, yet it leaves cedents and reinsurers alike thinking they see opportunities left on the table. In reality, these opportunities are a mirage – without concurrency they disappear, leaving in their place an expensive process that struggles to match the performance of concurrent terms. So why do cedents see opportunities, and why do those opportunities disappear? We will see that the answer, witnessed in analogous markets across a wide variety of industries, lies in game theory – for a reinsurer, to be paid far below the rest of the market is leaves money on the table risks undermining their own portfolio; when cedents relax concurrency, reinsurers who would otherwise have been competitive typically protect themselves by offering less-favorable terms than they would be willing to accept as concurrent FOT.

Insurance companies worry about finding reinsurance that works for their businesses. In today’s hard market this concern is palpable. Without clear information about what the market will bear, we see many cedents tightening their reinsurance buys, limiting the options that they consider, and driving hard on the cost of what they do buy. Through all this, opportunity is lost. Variations that might be profitable for cedent and reinsurer alike are never explored.

Today’s hardening market is challenging for so many reasons. Reinsurers are suffering from catastrophe fatigue and Covid losses. They are projecting rate increases but their rate expectations are not uniform. Primary insurers may decide to retain more risk rather than pay higher prices for protection, despite the fact that this would increase capital constraints. By far, the worst part about today’s hardening market is the uncertainty that comes from a lack of coordinated information.

This week, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded jointly to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.” The award highlights the power of auction technology to solve real-word problems. Mechanism design, which includes auction design and related topics, has received considerable attention from the Nobel committee, which previously awarded the prize to Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley for their work in 2012.

Reinsurance purchasing is a huge black box for management teams. There is no way of knowing the market clearing price for protection. Instead, reinsurance purchasers determine pricing with individual negotiations, incomplete data and educated guesses. So executives spend millions of dollars on protection without complete market information. This is just one of the five key mistakes made by reinsurance buyers. Tremor Technologies helps reinsurance buyers avoid mistakes like this by leveraging our “smart market” platform to price and clear transactions competitively.