Ph.D. Candidate Olivier Côté Receives 2026 American Academy of Actuaries Research Award
WASHINGTON—On the evening of July 23, 2026, at the 2026 Actuarial Research Conference hosted by The Ohio State University, American Academy of Actuaries Research Committee Vice Chairperson Becky Sheppard presented the Academy’s 4th annual Award for Research to Olivier Côté, a Ph.D. candidate at Université Laval’s School of Actuarial Science in Quebec City.
The award recognizes work by an early-career scholar contributing significantly to an actuarial perspective on a public policy issue of interest to U.S. actuaries and public policymakers. For this year’s award, the Research Committee solicited submissions on the theme of “Access, Affordability, and The Protection Gap: Determinants, consequences, and policy recommendations to manage financial risk.” Côté received the award as co-author of “A Scalable Toolbox for Exposing Indirect Discrimination in Insurance Rates,” a research paper published as part of the Casualty Actuarial Society’s Series on Bias and Insurance. The award includes a $7,500 honorarium.
Related to the award’s theme, the research identifies three core dimensions of fairness in insurance pricing; integrates them into a common framework for assessment; and illustrates the variation in possible assessments with a case study based on a real dataset of approximately 768,000 vehicles insured in Québec (2016–2017) that covers at-fault material damage claims. Importantly for the insurance context, the research demonstrated how unfairness can be measured in individual dollar terms and provided a way to pinpoint disparities among policyholder segments.
“Côté and his colleagues took a novel approach, drawing on lessons from machine learning research and adapting them to the insurance context to create a scalable tool for assessing fairness in insurance,” said Sheppard. “Their work is both promising and practical, helping to show potential unfairness in concrete, real-world terms that are meaningful to actuaries, regulators, researchers, and other stakeholders.”
Côté and others who made submissions for the research award participated in a July 22 Academy-sponsored session at the Actuarial Research Conference, where they presented and discussed their respective research.
Learn more about the award and the Academy’s public policy research program at actuary.org.
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The American Academy of Actuaries is a 21,000-member professional association whose mission is to serve the public and the U.S. actuarial profession. For 60+ years, the Academy has assisted public policymakers on all levels by providing leadership, objective expertise, and actuarial advice on risk and financial security issues. The Academy also sets qualification, practice, and professionalism standards for actuaries in the United States.