Ranking insurance firms using AHP and Factor Analysis

Insurance industry includes a significant part of economy and it is important to learn more about the capabilities of different firms, which are active in this industry. In this paper, we present an empirical study to rank the insurance firms using analytical hierarchy process as well as factor analysis. The study considers four criteria including capital adequacy, quality of earning, quality of cash flow and quality of firms’ assets. The results of the implementation of factor analysis (FA) have been verified using Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO=0.573) and Bartlettʹs Chi-Square (443.267 P-value=0.000) tests. According to the results FA, the first important factor, capital adequacy, represents 21.557% of total variance, the second factor, quality of income, represents 20.958% of total variance. In addition, the third factor, quality of cash flow, represents 19.417% of total variance and the last factor, quality of assets, represents 18.641% of total variance. The study has also used analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to rank insurance firms. The results of our survey indicate that capital adequacy (0.559) is accounted as the most important factor followed by quality of income (0.235), quality of cash flow (0.144) and quality of assets (0.061). The results of AHP are consistent with the results of FA, which somewhat validates the overall study.