PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Advanced Underwriting Simulation is an extremely flexible, multifaceted spreadsheet underwriting game that simulates the property-casualty market. Underwriters working in teams of 3 or 4, compete for a book of 30 "plain vanilla" main street commercial accounts. The game is conducted with very tight time constraints to simulate a real world underwriting environment. The program surfaces the true nature of an underwriter's decision making process and identifies biases related to location, class, producer, loss history, and financial stability. Once these biases are recognized, underwriters should be better equipped to modify their decision making to become more objective and less subjective in determining what to write. Biases do not result in "bad" business being put on the books, but rather they may lead to rejection of "good" accounts.

The first half-day of the 1½ day program is devoted to an industry overview and detailed explanation of various measures of underwriting performance; primarily loss and expense ratios as well as differences between calendar, accident and policy year results.

The afternoon of day 1 is devoted exclusively to the game. Teams are given 4 hours to complete the bidding and are provided periodic updates reflecting the bidding for each risk and which team has won the risk. The game produces results on a fully developed policy year basis. Although there are only 30 accounts, underwriting decisions on each account are iterated hundreds of time to ensure statistical credibility. The results of the game are not revealed until day 2.

The morning of day 2 is dedicated to discussion of each team's decision making process and then the game results are distributed. A post mortem of the results is conducted to demonstrate how various team decisions affected the outcome. Teams are then allowed to change pricing strategy and new results are produced to illustrate impact of pricing strategy on the overall game and team performance.

PREREQUISITES
Two plus years of underwriting experience is preferred, but all property-casualty underwriters should benefit from this program.

SUGGESTED AUDIENCE
Property-casualty underwriting managers and underwriters