A Stochastic Model Underlying the Chain-Ladder Technique

This paper presents a statistical model underlying the chain-ladder technique. This is related to other statistical approaches to the chain-ladder technique which have been presented previously. The statistical model is cast in the form of a generalized linear model, and a quasi-likelihood approach is used. It is shown that this enables the method to process negative incremental claims. It is suggested that the chain-ladder technique represents a very narrow view of the possible range of models.