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03

Actuaries: Behaving irrationally

Open-access content Thursday 25th February 2016 — updated 5.50pm, Wednesday 29th April 2020

February’s edition of The Actuary featured my book review of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics by Richard Thaler (bit.ly/1PKsp6A).

February's edition of The Actuary featured my book review of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics by Richard Thaler (bit.ly/1PKsp6A). The science of behavioural economics is important for us in our work persuading people to take out insurance, contribute to pensions policies or plan for their financial well-being. But perhaps more importantly, the book is great fun to read, dealing with all kinds of anomaly in human interaction.

My favourite conundrum, which I posed to readers, was: "Guess a number from 0 to 100 with the goal of making your guess as close as possible to two-thirds of the average guess of all those participating in the contest."

I am pleased to say we had a number of respondents. Now, if everyone had responded rationally, they would all have answered zero and won the prize. But of course not everyone answers rationally. So the right answer to this particular conundrum is usually to choose a number pretty low that accommodates a few irrational (illogical or normal) people.

Well, in this experiment, it seems there were quite a few rational respondents, answering zero. But the average was 4.6 - a lot less than answers of around 20 from a typical cross-sections of 'humans'. So two-thirds of the average is 3.1. It means that our canny winner is Ian Rogers, who was closest with a guess of 1. No prizes for our winner I'm afraid, other than the recognition of being the canniest of them all.

So what does this small experiment tell us? Well, it highlights how people do not always behave as rationally as we might expect, and this is worth bearing in mind when we're designing insurance or pension products. It also shows that actuaries are not immune to irrational behaviour, though much better than the population as a whole!


Peter Tompkins

18 February


This article appeared in our March 2016 issue of The Actuary .
Click here to view this issue

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