A note on a Lévy insurance risk model under periodic dividend decisions

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a spectrally negative Lévy insurance risk process with a barrier-type dividend strategy. In contrast to the traditional barrier strategy in which dividends are payable to the shareholders immediately when the surplus process reaches a fixed level b (as long as ruin has not yet occurred), it is assumed that the insurer only makes dividend decisions at some discrete time points in the spirit of [1]. Under such a dividend strategy with Erlang inter-dividend-decision times, expressions for the Gerber-Shiu expected discounted penalty function proposed in [24] and the moments of total discounted dividends payable until ruin are derived. The results are expressed in terms of the scale functions of a spectrally negative Lévy process and an embedded spectrally negative Markov additive process. Our analyses rely on the introduction of a potential measure associated with an Erlang random variable. Numerical illustrations are also given.