The Risk Screening Effect of Digital Insurance Distribution. Finbarr Murphy, Wei Xu and Xian Xu, Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2024.

Extant research holds that digital sales channels advance competition and service or goods availability but rarely details the attendant information asymmetry. Leveraging a large unique dataset, this study examines a specific case in which consumers have a choice between offline and digital channels for insurance purchases. We find that digital channels screen in consumers with lower unobserved risk. For term life, endowment and disease insurance products, the average risks of the policies purchased through digital channels were significantly lower than those purchased offline after controlling for all observed risk characteristics. This risk screening effect mainly comes from the inclusion of new low-risk enrollees. As a consequence, digital channels exhibit lower information asymmetry and greater profitability compared to offline channels.

How Does the Insurer's Mobile Application Sales Strategy Perform? An Chen, Yusha Chen, Finbarr Murphy, Wei Xu and Xian Xu, Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2023.

While the impact of an Internet-based sales strategy on sales performance has been well studied, there is little academic research that examines the impact of a mobile application (MA) sales strategy on the sales performance of insurers. Using a unique data set for term life insurance policies from a Chinese life insurer, we study the impact of implementing this strategy on insurance purchases. We find significant growth in the insurance purchase quantity and somewhat lower growth in premiums received from new policies (PRNP). This paper determines that this is due to improved channel accessibility and the cost reduction of the MA channel. Although sales of traditional distribution channels are cannibalized in the short term by the MA distribution strategy, this substitution effect does not persist in the long run. In addition, we find that this strategy reduces impulsive purchases.

Dynamic Communication and Perception of Cyber Risk: Evidence from Big Data in Media. Wei Xu, Finbarr Murphy and Xian Xu, Computers in Human Behavior, 2021.

Cyber risk is consistently viewed as a threat to the proper function of commercial and societal activity. Regardless of whether this risk is real or perceived, understanding how societal communication and perception of it change over time has important implications for both regulatory authorities and insurers. This contribution analyzes Chinese media news over the years 2009–2018 to identify the dynamics of cyber risk sources and associated societal assessment. Taking the psychometric paradigm as its point of departure and applying combination of computational and statistical methods, we identify 34 sources of cyber risk. The actions of government turn out to have a significant impact on public attention to the different sources of cyber risk, an influence that has been neglected in past research. The dynamics of societal aversion against most cyber risk sources are found to present inverted-U shapes. Adaptation and learning effects are found to explain this dynamic. Another finding is that news sentiment has a strong correlation with cyber risk perception, an insight of importance for regulators and insurers.

I presented Risk Screening in Digital Insurance Distribution: Evidence and Explanations in following conferences/seminars:
Annual Conference of Irish Academy of Finance, Dublin, 2023; TH-Koln Workshop, Cologne, 2023; 2022 Spring Seminar Series, Limerick, 2022.

I presented How Does the Insurer's Mobile Application Sales Strategy Perform? in following conferences/seminars:
2023 Spring Seminar Series, Limerick, 2023; Emerging Risk Seminar, Dublin, 2021.

I presented Does the Mobile Application Sales Channel Strengthen Insurance Inclusivity? in following conferences/seminars:
2023 Spring Seminar Series, Limerick, 2023.

I presented Dynamic Communication and Perception of Cyber Risk: Evidence from Big Data in Media in following conferences/seminars:
CONVENTION A 2022, Shanghai, 2022; Conference on Endogenous Security Development in Cyberspace, Shanghai, 2021.