Policyholder exercise behavior presents an important risk factor for life insurance companies. Yet, most approaches presented in the academic literature – building on value maximizing strategies akin to the valuation of American options – do not square well with observed prices and exercise patterns.

Following a recent strand of literature, in order to gain insights on what drives policyholder behavior, I first develop a life-cycle model for variable annuities (VA) with withdrawal guarantees. However, I explicitly allow for outside savings and investments, which considerably affects the results. Specifically, I find that withdrawal patterns after all are primarily motivated by value maximization – but with the important asterisk that the value maximization should be taken out from the policyholders’ perspective accounting for individual tax benefits.

To this effect, I develop a risk-neutral valuation methodology that takes these different tax structures into consideration, and apply it to our example contract as well as a representative empirical VA. The results are in line with corresponding outcomes from the life cycle model, and I find that the withdrawal guarantee fee from the empirical product roughly accords with its marginal price to the insurer.

I further consider the implications of policyholder behavior on product design. In particular – due to differential tax treatments and contrary to option pricing theory – the marginal value of such guarantees can become negative, even when the holder is a value maximizer. For instance, as I illustrate with both a simple two-period model and an empirical VA, a common death benefit guarantee may indeed yield a negative marginal value to the insurer.