Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision-making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit review fraud on the popular review platform Yelp, using two complementary approaches and datasets. We begin by analyzing restaurant reviews that are identified by Yelp's filtering algorithm as suspicious, or fake ? and treat these as a proxy for review fraud (an assumption we provide evidence for). We present four main findings. First, roughly 16% of restaurant reviews on Yelp are filtered. These reviews tend to be more extreme (favorable or unfavorable) than other reviews, and the prevalence of suspicious reviews has grown significantly over time. Second, a restaurant is more likely to commit review fraud when its reputation is weak, i.e., when it has few reviews, or it has recently received bad reviews. Third, chain restaurants ? which benefit less from Yelp ? are also less likely to commit review fraud. Fourth, when restaurants face increased competition, they become more likely to receive unfavorable fake reviews. Using a separate dataset, we analyze businesses that were caught soliciting fake reviews through a sting conducted by Yelp. These data support our main results, and shed further light on the economic incentives behind a business's decision to leave fake reviews.
{"title":"Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud","authors":"Michael Luca, G. Zervas","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2293164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2293164","url":null,"abstract":"Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision-making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit review fraud on the popular review platform Yelp, using two complementary approaches and datasets. We begin by analyzing restaurant reviews that are identified by Yelp's filtering algorithm as suspicious, or fake ? and treat these as a proxy for review fraud (an assumption we provide evidence for). We present four main findings. First, roughly 16% of restaurant reviews on Yelp are filtered. These reviews tend to be more extreme (favorable or unfavorable) than other reviews, and the prevalence of suspicious reviews has grown significantly over time. Second, a restaurant is more likely to commit review fraud when its reputation is weak, i.e., when it has few reviews, or it has recently received bad reviews. Third, chain restaurants ? which benefit less from Yelp ? are also less likely to commit review fraud. Fourth, when restaurants face increased competition, they become more likely to receive unfavorable fake reviews. Using a separate dataset, we analyze businesses that were caught soliciting fake reviews through a sting conducted by Yelp. These data support our main results, and shed further light on the economic incentives behind a business's decision to leave fake reviews.","PeriodicalId":255992,"journal":{"name":"Consumer Financial Fraud eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116839421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fraud in the financial sector is a growing business for fraudsters using increasingly innovative and creative ways of targeting any perceived weaknesses in the banks and credit granting systems. Fraudsters have become ever more sophisticated, which means that fraud prevention measures need to constantly evolve to ensure they are capable of handling the threat. The fight against fraud is of crucial importance to financial service institutions. Not only does it affect their business, but it also has a significant impact on consumers in particular and the economy at large. Using a case study and historical approach and relying heavily on secondary sources of information, this study among others found a horde of laxity, inconsistencies and knowledge gaps among practitioners, thereby creating loopholes with which the fraudsters commit their nefarious deeds. There is also the absence of the right policy framework and laws to coherently safeguard lenders and borrowers. The study recommends a stiffer control measures within all financial organizations in the country as well as the enactment of enabling laws by the government to checkmate these ugly incidences. Keywords : Internal bank frauds, Forgeries, Internal control, Compliance, Customers
{"title":"Reputational Risk Impact of Internal Frauds on Bank Customers in Nigeria","authors":"Prof Edwin Agwu","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3120537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3120537","url":null,"abstract":"Fraud in the financial sector is a growing business for fraudsters using increasingly innovative and creative ways of targeting any perceived weaknesses in the banks and credit granting systems. Fraudsters have become ever more sophisticated, which means that fraud prevention measures need to constantly evolve to ensure they are capable of handling the threat. The fight against fraud is of crucial importance to financial service institutions. Not only does it affect their business, but it also has a significant impact on consumers in particular and the economy at large. Using a case study and historical approach and relying heavily on secondary sources of information, this study among others found a horde of laxity, inconsistencies and knowledge gaps among practitioners, thereby creating loopholes with which the fraudsters commit their nefarious deeds. There is also the absence of the right policy framework and laws to coherently safeguard lenders and borrowers. The study recommends a stiffer control measures within all financial organizations in the country as well as the enactment of enabling laws by the government to checkmate these ugly incidences. Keywords : Internal bank frauds, Forgeries, Internal control, Compliance, Customers","PeriodicalId":255992,"journal":{"name":"Consumer Financial Fraud eJournal","volume":"2012 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131943448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Accounting fraud is defined as intentional misstatement of financial reports, in violation of generally accepted accounting principles, with the objective of making certain people act in detriment to their best interests. It is possible to identify the determinants of fraud using an econometric model, but the dependent variable (occurrence of fraud in a given company) is vulnerable to misclassification: Not every case of fraud will be detected, thus false negatives are possible. This paper estimates the percentage of undiscovered frauds and also estimates a probit model to detect fraud in US companies. The dependent variable was built using the instances of fraud discovered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The model was estimated only with frauds that occurred between 1998 and 2002 (since many cases of fraud from the last years are still unknown). The independent variables were chosen using the concept of fraud triangle. The financial statement data were obtained using Compustat. The results show that the likelihood of fraud is negatively related to the current ratio, to the cash change (scaled by total assets) and to the fixed assets (also scaled by total assets). Companies that changed their auditors or receive a qualified auditing report are more susceptible to fraud. The probability that a case of fraud is not detected was estimated as 97.61%; this means just a small part of fraud cases are discovered by the SEC.
{"title":"Accounting Fraud Detection: Is it Possible to Quantify Undiscovered Cases?","authors":"A. Wuerges, Jose Alonso Borba","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1718652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1718652","url":null,"abstract":"Accounting fraud is defined as intentional misstatement of financial reports, in violation of generally accepted accounting principles, with the objective of making certain people act in detriment to their best interests. It is possible to identify the determinants of fraud using an econometric model, but the dependent variable (occurrence of fraud in a given company) is vulnerable to misclassification: Not every case of fraud will be detected, thus false negatives are possible. This paper estimates the percentage of undiscovered frauds and also estimates a probit model to detect fraud in US companies. The dependent variable was built using the instances of fraud discovered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The model was estimated only with frauds that occurred between 1998 and 2002 (since many cases of fraud from the last years are still unknown). The independent variables were chosen using the concept of fraud triangle. The financial statement data were obtained using Compustat. The results show that the likelihood of fraud is negatively related to the current ratio, to the cash change (scaled by total assets) and to the fixed assets (also scaled by total assets). Companies that changed their auditors or receive a qualified auditing report are more susceptible to fraud. The probability that a case of fraud is not detected was estimated as 97.61%; this means just a small part of fraud cases are discovered by the SEC.","PeriodicalId":255992,"journal":{"name":"Consumer Financial Fraud eJournal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123761444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tina D Carpenter, Jane L. Reimers, Phillip Z. Fretwell
Recent financial reporting scandals have prompted actions directed at improving corporate governance, especially as it relates to fraud prevention and detection. Internal auditors are now perceived as an important part of the solution to this breakdown in financial reporting and ethical behavior. We investigate whether the group interaction commonly associated with brainstorming is necessary to reap the benefits of brainstorming for auditors’ fraud judgments. We also investigate whether this group interaction can reduce a response mode bias that auditors have been shown to exhibit when assessing risk qualitatively or quantitatively. Results from our experiment suggest that internal auditors who brainstorm in groups provide higher fraud risk assessments than individual auditors who brainstorm alone, and the brainstorming groups also identify more quality fraud risks than individual auditors who brainstorm alone. Consistent with prior research, we find that auditors who assess risk qualitatively generally provide higher fraud risk assessments than those auditors who assess risk quantitatively. However, group brainstorming appears to significantly reduce this bias. We conclude that group brainstorming could provide benefits for internal auditors when making fraud judgments.
{"title":"Internal Auditors' Fraud Risk Assessments: The Benefits of Brainstorming in Groups","authors":"Tina D Carpenter, Jane L. Reimers, Phillip Z. Fretwell","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.961032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.961032","url":null,"abstract":"Recent financial reporting scandals have prompted actions directed at improving corporate governance, especially as it relates to fraud prevention and detection. Internal auditors are now perceived as an important part of the solution to this breakdown in financial reporting and ethical behavior. We investigate whether the group interaction commonly associated with brainstorming is necessary to reap the benefits of brainstorming for auditors’ fraud judgments. We also investigate whether this group interaction can reduce a response mode bias that auditors have been shown to exhibit when assessing risk qualitatively or quantitatively. Results from our experiment suggest that internal auditors who brainstorm in groups provide higher fraud risk assessments than individual auditors who brainstorm alone, and the brainstorming groups also identify more quality fraud risks than individual auditors who brainstorm alone. Consistent with prior research, we find that auditors who assess risk qualitatively generally provide higher fraud risk assessments than those auditors who assess risk quantitatively. However, group brainstorming appears to significantly reduce this bias. We conclude that group brainstorming could provide benefits for internal auditors when making fraud judgments.","PeriodicalId":255992,"journal":{"name":"Consumer Financial Fraud eJournal","volume":"17 1-2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114048457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2006-09-01DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6296.2006.00090.x
Hunsoo Kim, W. Kwon
ABSTRACT This article introduces a government-led insurance fraud detection program in Korea. The Insurance Fraud Recognition System (IFRS) uses policy and claims data from multi-lines of insurance (life, automobile, and fire), employs a threestage statistical and link analysis to identify presumably fraudulent claims by claimant or by group, and generates system reports that the government regulator draws on to make decisions. The authors evaluate the system based on the fraud statistics and IFRS results for 2004, and offer recommendations for system improvement. This article examines existing studies about fraud, industry experiments using advanced technology, and government assistance to the insurance industry's fight against fraud in selected countries. It also provides a brief overview of the Korean insurance market, especially after the recent Asian economic crisis. INTRODUCTION Every valid insurance contract requires the presence of insurable interest. Without this requisite, unethical persons and entities would use the insurance mechanism to support their gambling activity rather than to protect their wealth against future losses, and insurers would face extreme difficulty in estimating their contractual liabilities to policyholders. Controlling problems of moral hazard with this requisite is a means of keeping the cost of insurance at a reasonable level. However, use of this passive approach alone does not guarantee operational and financial soundness of the insurance mechanism. Insurers need to employ active approaches to identify genuine claims and expedite services for those claims, while deterring people from filing false or inflated claims. Detecting such claims is equally important. The term "fraud" in the insurance industry is broadly used to refer to false or inflated claims. To be precise, fraud refers to an act that a person or entity, individually or jointly, willfully commits to obtain a monetary gain from an insurer by knowingly presenting false evidence of economic loss.1 The evidence can be false in its entirety, thus making the act an attempt of "hard fraud," or false in part (e.g., inflating the actual loss amount), thus making it an attempt of "soft fraud." These types of deliberate and intentional acts, when not prevented or captured, increase the cost of insurance. Ex ante elimination of fraudulency in the insurance market is feasible only in theory, as it literally means a complete control of moral hazard in the market. Instead, we tend to employ ex post approaches that can effectively deter unethical persons' attempts to gain financially by ill-using the insurance mechanism, or penalize the deceit. These approaches often require coordination of efforts by three parties. First, the insurance industry must develop a market environment where genuine claims are honored. It can do so by furthering the clarity of the terms and conditions in insurance contracts and by maintaining effective claims management programs. The g
本文介绍了韩国政府主导的保险欺诈检测项目。保险欺诈识别系统(IFRS)使用来自多个保险类别(人寿、汽车和火灾)的保单和索赔数据,采用三阶段统计和关联分析来识别索赔人或团体可能存在的欺诈性索赔,并生成系统报告,供政府监管机构参考以做出决策。基于2004年的舞弊统计数据和IFRS结果,作者对该系统进行了评估,并提出了系统改进的建议。本文考察了有关欺诈的现有研究、使用先进技术的行业实验以及政府对选定国家的保险业打击欺诈的援助。它还提供了韩国保险市场的简要概述,特别是在最近的亚洲经济危机之后。任何有效的保险合同都需要保险利益的存在。如果没有这一必要条件,不道德的个人和实体将利用保险机制来支持他们的赌博活动,而不是保护他们的财富免受未来的损失,保险公司在估计他们对保单持有人的合同责任方面将面临极大的困难。用这一必要条件来控制道德风险问题是将保险成本保持在合理水平的一种手段。但是,仅使用这种被动办法并不能保证保险机制的业务和财务健全。保险公司需要采用积极的方法来识别真正的索赔,并加快对这些索赔的服务,同时阻止人们提交虚假或夸大的索赔。发现这种说法同样重要。“欺诈”一词在保险业中广泛用于指虚假或夸大的索赔。准确地说,欺诈是指一个人或实体,单独或共同,故意通过故意提供虚假的经济损失证据,从保险公司获得金钱利益的行为证据可以是完全虚假的,从而使该行为成为“硬欺诈”的企图,或部分虚假(例如,夸大实际损失金额),从而使其成为“软欺诈”的企图。这些类型的蓄意和故意行为,如果不加以预防或捕获,就会增加保险费用。事先消除保险市场中的欺诈行为仅在理论上可行,因为它实际上意味着对市场道德风险的完全控制。相反,我们倾向于采用事后处理的方法,可以有效地阻止不道德的人试图通过滥用保险机制来获取经济利益,或者惩罚欺骗行为。这些办法往往需要三方协调努力。首先,保险业必须营造一个能够兑现真实理赔的市场环境。它可以通过进一步明确保险合同中的条款和条件以及维持有效的索赔管理程序来实现这一目标。政府可以通过改革法律环境来帮助保险业,使保险欺诈无一例外地成为犯罪。该院士可以为开发和加强欺诈威慑或检测程序提供研究支持。我们将在下面的章节中讨论这三方的努力。学术研究自20世纪80年代初以来,学术界和产业界的许多研究人员对保险市场中的道德风险(特别是欺诈)问题进行了研究并提出了解决方案。值得注意的研究包括,但不限于,检查保险的存在如何影响欺诈的可能性(Dionne, 1984),八个国家的保险人和被保险人对欺诈的感知(Clark, 1990),无过错汽车保险制度下的行为因素和抽奖条件(Derrig, Weisberg, and Chen, 1994),工人赔偿保险欺诈(Butler, Durbin, and Helvacian, 1996),理论上诱导欺诈的经济环境(Boyer,2000年),索赔审计作为一种手段,以阻止和发现欺诈汽车保险(Tennyson和Salsas-Forn, 2002年),使用一般损害赔偿的保险公司,以减少欺诈性索赔(Loughran, 2005年),以及共同保险和欺诈频率之间的关系在医疗保健行业(Sulzle和Wambach, 2005年)。…
{"title":"A Multi-Line Insurance Fraud Recognition System: A Government-Led Approach in Korea","authors":"Hunsoo Kim, W. Kwon","doi":"10.1111/j.1540-6296.2006.00090.x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6296.2006.00090.x","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article introduces a government-led insurance fraud detection program in Korea. The Insurance Fraud Recognition System (IFRS) uses policy and claims data from multi-lines of insurance (life, automobile, and fire), employs a threestage statistical and link analysis to identify presumably fraudulent claims by claimant or by group, and generates system reports that the government regulator draws on to make decisions. The authors evaluate the system based on the fraud statistics and IFRS results for 2004, and offer recommendations for system improvement. This article examines existing studies about fraud, industry experiments using advanced technology, and government assistance to the insurance industry's fight against fraud in selected countries. It also provides a brief overview of the Korean insurance market, especially after the recent Asian economic crisis. INTRODUCTION Every valid insurance contract requires the presence of insurable interest. Without this requisite, unethical persons and entities would use the insurance mechanism to support their gambling activity rather than to protect their wealth against future losses, and insurers would face extreme difficulty in estimating their contractual liabilities to policyholders. Controlling problems of moral hazard with this requisite is a means of keeping the cost of insurance at a reasonable level. However, use of this passive approach alone does not guarantee operational and financial soundness of the insurance mechanism. Insurers need to employ active approaches to identify genuine claims and expedite services for those claims, while deterring people from filing false or inflated claims. Detecting such claims is equally important. The term \"fraud\" in the insurance industry is broadly used to refer to false or inflated claims. To be precise, fraud refers to an act that a person or entity, individually or jointly, willfully commits to obtain a monetary gain from an insurer by knowingly presenting false evidence of economic loss.1 The evidence can be false in its entirety, thus making the act an attempt of \"hard fraud,\" or false in part (e.g., inflating the actual loss amount), thus making it an attempt of \"soft fraud.\" These types of deliberate and intentional acts, when not prevented or captured, increase the cost of insurance. Ex ante elimination of fraudulency in the insurance market is feasible only in theory, as it literally means a complete control of moral hazard in the market. Instead, we tend to employ ex post approaches that can effectively deter unethical persons' attempts to gain financially by ill-using the insurance mechanism, or penalize the deceit. These approaches often require coordination of efforts by three parties. First, the insurance industry must develop a market environment where genuine claims are honored. It can do so by furthering the clarity of the terms and conditions in insurance contracts and by maintaining effective claims management programs. The g","PeriodicalId":255992,"journal":{"name":"Consumer Financial Fraud eJournal","volume":"19 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123555357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study examines whether higher levels of skepticism are correlated with behaviors that might enable internal auditors to better detect fraud. Specifically, the Hurtt Skepticism Scale (Hurtt 2003) is used to classify internal auditors responding to a questionnaire as either high or low skeptics. The auditors are confronted with various types of fraud symptoms to evaluate whether higher levels of skepticism increase the desire to search for additional facts and potentially lead to improving fraud detection. In addition, a change in the behavior of the high and low skeptics in the desire for seeking more information after a one-day fraud awareness training session is examined. The results show that internal auditors who rank higher on the skepticism scales generally have a significantly greater desire to increase their information search related to fraud symptoms. After training, the differences between the high and low skepticism groups are narrowed for several of the personality characteristics. This research provides some of the first empirical evidence of the important relationship between skepticism characteristics and fraud detection skills.
{"title":"The Effect of Professional Skepticism on the Fraud Detection Skills of Internal Auditors","authors":"R. Fullerton, Cindy Durtschi","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.617062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.617062","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines whether higher levels of skepticism are correlated with behaviors that might enable internal auditors to better detect fraud. Specifically, the Hurtt Skepticism Scale (Hurtt 2003) is used to classify internal auditors responding to a questionnaire as either high or low skeptics. The auditors are confronted with various types of fraud symptoms to evaluate whether higher levels of skepticism increase the desire to search for additional facts and potentially lead to improving fraud detection. In addition, a change in the behavior of the high and low skeptics in the desire for seeking more information after a one-day fraud awareness training session is examined. The results show that internal auditors who rank higher on the skepticism scales generally have a significantly greater desire to increase their information search related to fraud symptoms. After training, the differences between the high and low skepticism groups are narrowed for several of the personality characteristics. This research provides some of the first empirical evidence of the important relationship between skepticism characteristics and fraud detection skills.","PeriodicalId":255992,"journal":{"name":"Consumer Financial Fraud eJournal","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129149920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
P. Brockett, R. Derrig, L. Golden, A. Levine, M. Alpert
This article introduces to the statistical and insurance literature a mathematical technique for an a priori classification of objects when no training sample exists for which the exact correct group membership is known. The article also provides an example of the empirical application of the methodology to fraud detection for bodily injury claims in automobile insurance. With this technique, principal component analysis of RIDIT scores (PRIDIT), an insurance fraud detector can reduce uncertainty and increase the chances of targeting the appropriate claims so that an organization will be more likely to allocate investigative resources efficiently to uncover insurance fraud. In addition, other (exogenous) empirical models can be validated relative to the PRIDIT-derived weights for optimal ranking of fraud/nonfraud claims and/or profiling. The technique at once gives measures of the individual fraud indicator variables' worth and a measure of individual claim file suspicion level for the entire claim file that can be used to cogently direct further fraud investigation resources. Moreover, the technique does so at a lower cost than utilizing human insurance investigators, or insurance adjusters, but with similar outcomes. More generally, this technique is applicable to other commonly encountered managerial settings in which a large number of assignment decisions are made subjectively based on "clues," which may change dramatically over time. This article explores the application of these techniques to injury insurance claims for automobile bodily injury in detail.
{"title":"Fraud Classification Using Principal Component Analysis of Ridits","authors":"P. Brockett, R. Derrig, L. Golden, A. Levine, M. Alpert","doi":"10.1111/1539-6975.00027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1539-6975.00027","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces to the statistical and insurance literature a mathematical technique for an a priori classification of objects when no training sample exists for which the exact correct group membership is known. The article also provides an example of the empirical application of the methodology to fraud detection for bodily injury claims in automobile insurance. With this technique, principal component analysis of RIDIT scores (PRIDIT), an insurance fraud detector can reduce uncertainty and increase the chances of targeting the appropriate claims so that an organization will be more likely to allocate investigative resources efficiently to uncover insurance fraud. In addition, other (exogenous) empirical models can be validated relative to the PRIDIT-derived weights for optimal ranking of fraud/nonfraud claims and/or profiling. The technique at once gives measures of the individual fraud indicator variables' worth and a measure of individual claim file suspicion level for the entire claim file that can be used to cogently direct further fraud investigation resources. Moreover, the technique does so at a lower cost than utilizing human insurance investigators, or insurance adjusters, but with similar outcomes. More generally, this technique is applicable to other commonly encountered managerial settings in which a large number of assignment decisions are made subjectively based on \"clues,\" which may change dramatically over time. This article explores the application of these techniques to injury insurance claims for automobile bodily injury in detail.","PeriodicalId":255992,"journal":{"name":"Consumer Financial Fraud eJournal","volume":"662 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"118558170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}