What Should We Expect from the Digital Revolution for the Insurability of Risk?

The economics of insurance has demonstrated that information is at the core of the insurability problem, and more generally of the allocation of risks in the economy. In this article, I show that improving the quality of information generally has an ambiguous effect on the efficiency of risk sharing. But one can expect that the digital revolution will reinforce insurance through various positive channels: reduction of the costs of marketing and indemnification, weakening of adverse selection and moral hazard problems, reduction of the ambiguity of the loss distribution. On the contrary, information erodes the ability to mutualize risks, by transforming risk into inequalities.