The design of equity-indexed annuities

There is a rich variety of tailored investment products available to the retail investor in every developed economy. These contracts combine upside participation in bull markets with downside protection in bear markets. Examples include equity-linked contracts and other types of structured products. This paper analyzes these contracts from the investor’s perspective rather than the issuer’s using concepts and tools from financial economics. We analyze and critique their current design and examine their valuation from the investor’s perspective. We propose a generalization of the conventional design that has some interesting features. The generalized contract specifications are obtained by assuming that the investor wishes to maximize end of period expected utility of wealth subject to certain constraints. The first constraint is a guaranteed minimum rate of return which is a common feature of conventional contracts. The second constraint is new. It provides the investor with the opportunity to outperform a benchmark portfolio with some probability. We present the explicit form of the optimal contract assuming both constraints apply and we illustrate the nature of the solution using specific examples. The paper focusses on equity-indexed annuities as a representative type of such contracts but our approach is applicable to other types of equity-linked contracts and structured products.