Inside the Econometric Game

Now that the Econometric Game, 2015 is over I can reveal the cases that the teams grappled with. The Case Makers were Bas Werker and Ramon van den Akker, both of Tilburg University.

You'll recall that thirty teams, from various parts of the world, played The Game this year. On Day 1, the teams received information about the topic, together with the data and the papers that they should read by way of preparation. As I mentioned here, the topic was "Longevity and Longevity Risk".

On Day 2, the competition began in earnest, with the teams being challenged with Case 1.

The top ten teams from Day 2 then moved to the final part of the competition. This involved working on Case 2 on the third day of The Game.

Now, what about the cases themselves?

Case 1 was titled, Modeling Survivor Probabilities, and was motivated as follows:

"Many countries face the issue of ageing of their population. People live longer and longer, sometimes with increases of life expectancy in the order of two months per year. The implied changes in demography are of a global nature and are not only important in Europe and the US, but also in, for instance, China....... Model survival probabilities, for a country of your choice......."

The full details for the case are available here.

Case 2 was titled, Mitigating Longevity Risk:

"For the country of your choice you are asked to provide a policy advice on how to mitigate longevity risk in the old-age pension system. Assume therefore, for simplicity, that your country has a state-provided non-means-tested (that is, independent of an individual’s personal wealth) old age pension available for everyone as of a certain retirement age. In this system, as of retirement age, you’re entitled to a certain indexed amount of monthly pension."

(See here for a complete statement of this case.)

If you want to tackle the cases yourself, you'll find the data that the teams were to use at the Human Mortality Database (HMDB): www.mortality.org.

A big "thank you" to Nikki Wesslius for providing the information for these posts about the Econometric Game, 2015. Congratulations to the VSAE and their Organizing Committee for another highly successful Game. 

And, of course, special congratulations to the winning team from Maastricht University! 

The Econometric Game Trophy (courtesy Claire Bontje)

© 2015, David E. Giles