한국 자동차보험 시장에서의 역선택 문제

This article explains the issue of inequity of bearing the insurance premiums among the consumers in the Korean automobile insurance market through the concept of adverse selection, and empirically tests the issue. The main issues of the equity problem in the Korean automobile insurance are that the Korean government does not allow the insurance companies to impose the different premium rates to the consumers in different provinces in spite of the different average loss ratios of the consumers in different provinces, and that the current bonus-malus system imposes unfairly high premium rates to the high risks compared to their levels of risk and excessively low premium rates to the low risks. The results of these unfair premium rates are the adverse selection problem by the consumers and the counter actions by the insurers. The consumers with high expected loss ratios would be more likely to buy the insurance, but the insurers try to suppress the sales of the insurance policies to those high risks. The consumers with high expected accident rate would also be more likely to buy the insurance, but the insurers would not concern the accident rates of their customers. Therefore, the consumers with higher accident rates will be more likely to purchase insurance. This article empirically tests these hypotheses. The empirical analyses show that the consumers with higher loss ratios are less likely to purchase insurance, but the consumers with higher accident rates are more likely to purchase insurance.