農協共済推進活動の制度設計

インセンティヴ強度原理の検証

抄録

In recent years Japanese Agricultural Cooperatives have increased the staff in the insurance-selling division. The employees are called 'LA', and the number of them reached over 18,000 at the end of the fiscal year 2002. The author analyzes the data on the amount of long-term insurance policies sold by LAs for the years 1994, 1997, and 2000, and finds that LAs whose policy amount is more than about 8 hundred million yen follow a power-law distribution with an exponent of -3, while the rest follow a log-normal distribution.
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of incentives and operating rules on each group by applying the Incentive Intensity Principle generated from a principal-agent model. The analysis is based on data from Japanese Agricultural Cooperatives and their LA survey. The results show that manyparts of the contract menus by which the Japanese Agricultural Cooperatives create incentives and operating rules are consistent with the Principle. Some rules, especially the absence of limitation on LA's door-to-door selling areas, are different between two groups. The higher policy amount group has the rule of no limitation of selling areas, which increases the ability to respond to incentives. Japanese Agricultural Cooperatives increase the intensity of intensives with the LA's ability to respond to intensives in the higher policy amount group. It is consistent with the Principle. Moreover some LAs among the higher policy amount group realize their huge policy amount followed by a power-law distribution, under the conditions of this rule for more ability to respond to incentives.