Drawing up the official adjustment rules for damage assessment in agricultural insurance: Results of a Delphi survey for fruit crops in Spain

This paper presents the results of an innovative use of the Delphi technique to obtain quantitative information for the evaluation of the Official Adjustment Rules for Damage Assessment in agricultural insurance. An efficient insurance system must guarantee that loss adjustment is performed fairly and transparently, so that the continual review and modification of adjustment rules becomes especially important. The present study develops and applies a methodology based on the subjective information compiled by experts to evaluate the modification of the Specific Loss Adjustment Rule for Fruit Crops under real market conditions. The results show that the method employed comes forward as a valid option to provide reliable information, as well as other economic and social advantages, in the absence of alternative statistical sources. The validity of the study has been proved by its utility, as the results were extremely useful for drawing up a new Official Adjustment Rule. This application opens up an interesting field of development for this technique, which will enable the proposed methodology to be applied to similar studies in the context of agricultural insurance loss adjustment. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.