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The Impact of Insurance Policy on Insurance Complaint Ratios through Text Analysis

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In economics, contract theory had been based on complete contract where the stakeholders to an agreement describe their own rights and duties with consideration of every possible contingency in advance, before the incomplete contracting paradigm was proposed by Grossman (1986) and Hart (1990; 1995). In the practical contract between a company and an individual customer, the individual customers are cost prohibitive to consider the every possible state and thus often are under disadvantageous position. Prior research on incomplete contracts has been mainly considered with inter-firm aspect and paid relatively little attention to perspectives of the association of firm and consumer. The research on factors leading the contract to be incomplete and examining how information asymmetry due to incompleteness affects consumers’ satisfaction is insufficient and remain unsolved. Therefore, our research investigates how the extent to contract incompleteness between firms and consumers affects performance index of consumer service-oriented firms. Our paper focuses on insurance contracts where the individual customers may have high uncertainty and incur high costs to understand the clauses, resulting incomplete contract situation. According to Deloitte survey (2017), 90% of insurance customers accept legal terms and conditions without carefully reading them. In addition, most of subscriptions in insurance industry are achieved through acquaintances or personal relationships. We primarily addressed ambiguity, specifically semantic ambiguity in text-formed contracts, as the driver of incompleteness. Texts in nature have ambiguity. In particular, this problem might be critical in insurance contracts because insurance contracts comprise a qualified consumer, provision, limitation, and periods related with compensation. Confounding interpretation of contract between two parties may cause consumers’ dissatisfaction, may eventually leads to a legal suit. Given those contexts, we hypothesized that ambiguity of the contract increases customer dissatisfaction and consequently lower complaint documents. In this research, a complaint is defined as written correspondence expressing a grievance against an insurer or carrier, and it results in a written request for information from the company. To empirically support, we collected customers’ complaint documents of auto-insurance firms from 2005 until 2017 and their insurance contracts. Samples consist of 21 insurance firms across 8 states constructed the firm-state-year panel dataset. In baseline analysis, we identified whether firms' unobserved heterogeneous effects exist although observed characteristics are controlled. These unobserved effects were regarded as the effects of insurance contracts on complaints. Further, to estimate the impact of ambiguity on consumers’ dissatisfaction, we assessed the contracts in three perspective: overall ambiguity, word class, individual words. Starting with the degree of ambiguity in a given contract, we gradually narrowed the scope of independent variables by word class and individual words. Our baseline results showed that there exists firm-heterogeneity in complaints ratio. It is plausible that firm-specific contracts affect dissatisfaction of consumers. In terms of ambiguity, more clear contracts, frequent uses of the word classes that make subject to clarify such as personal pronoun, relatives, cardinal digit are more likely to reduce the complaints. we discuss the implications for the related literature on text analysis with respect to consumer satisfaction and firm performance. Our study expects to make theoretical contributions for academia and provide practical guidelines to industry that it can be used for consumer care and qualified service. Moreover we give suggestions to policy makers that the findings can be used for better supervision of insurance policy.

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Abstract

저자정보

  • Jeongkwon Seo Master Student School of Business and Technology Management, KAIST
  • Woojin Yang Ph.D Student School of Business and Technology Management, KAIST
  • Hyejin Mun Ph.D Student School of Business and Technology Management, KAIST
  • Chul ho Lee Assistant Professor School of Business and Technology Management, KAIST

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