Mergers and acquisitions in the insurance sector: A systematic and bibliometric analysis of research trends, determinants, and future directions

Financial performance is the fundamental aspect to test the performance of the companies. The performance of insurance sector, like any other service industry, is supposed to depend significantly on customers. When it comes to customers, it is an established fact that customer satisfaction would be an important element. Customer satisfaction primarily depends on the quality of service it gets. It can be safely hypothesized that better service quality would lead to higher satisfaction, which would ultimately lead to higher profits for the company. Studies on this relationship in the insurance sector for Saudi Arabia are missing. Hence, this study aims at studying both the profitability of companies and quality of service and tries to relate it to customer satisfaction. The results are quite surprising, as the study establishes that although the qualities of services are found wanting in many areas, companies are earning good profits. A probable reason could be the statutory nature of the services. Nevertheless, this study recommends improving the quality of services and differentiating services between age groups for further improvement.

In the current conditions of the Ukrainian economy, which is characterized by crisis phenomena and frequent changes in legislation, the insurance organizations are facing a number of difficulties in maintaining their financial sustainability. Moreover, these processes take place under the increased requirements for solvency of insurers. However, a significant part of domestic insurance companies is financially unstable, which is conditioned not only by the lack of funds, but also by the low level of management. This situation hinders the further development of the insurance market in Ukraine and has a negative impact on all areas of the domestic financial system and prevents it from successful integration into the European financial field. In order to address this problem, it is necessary to distinguish the key groups of risks that affect the financial sustainability of insurance organizations, among which there are the following: insurance, strategic, market risk, risk of inefficient capital structure, risk of limiting the insurance company’s liquidity, tax risk, investment risk, operational risk, the risk of ineffective organizational structure of the enterprise, and information risk. It should be noted that under conditions of changing environment, the impact of these risks only increases, and therefore the task of minimizing the impact of these risks on the activities of insurance companies is highly important. Accordingly, the authors of the article proposed a four-stage strategy to manage the financial sustainability of the insurance company, the purpose of which is to identify the risks of limiting the insurer’s financial sustainability, their qualitative and quantitative assessment, as well as the development and implementation of appropriate measures to minimize and eliminate unacceptable consequences.

This paper comprehensively evaluates the literature on retail investor overconfidence using a framework-based systematic approach to understand the various dimensions of overconfidence bias, its effect on investing choices, and market dynamics. A systematic review of 137 publications from the Scopus database have been done to detect the research trend concerning investor overconfidence bias from its inception. An integrated ADO-TCM framework has been employed to present a systematic analysis of the theory, context, and methodologies (TCM) employed in the reviewed studies. The ADO (Antecedents, Decisions, and Outcomes) framework thoroughly examines the antecedents, decisions, and results of investor overconfidence.
The study identified four broad sets of factors contributing to investor overconfidence, as found in the existing literature. These factors include demographic characteristics, personality traits of investors, their knowledge and experience, and the features of investments and investor types. The Prospect theory is the most popular theory in the literature, with much research using secondary data and experiment-based analysis. The prospective study directions, based on the gaps in the existing literature, are as follows: further investigation into the decision-making processes of overconfident retail and professional investors is a worthwhile subject. Future research may shift their focus from financial outcome variables to non-financial outcome variables such as the impact of investor overconfidence on individuals’ stress levels, subjective financial well-being, and overall life happiness.