This book provides a systematic treatment of optimal control methods applied to problems from insurance and investment, complete with detailed proofs. The theory is discussed and illustrated by way of examples, using concrete simple optimisation problems that occur in the actuarial sciences. The problems come from non-life insurance as well as life and pension insurance and also cover the famous Merton problem from mathematical finance. Wherever possible, the proofs are probabilistic but in some cases well-established analytical methods are used.

The book is directed towards graduate students and researchers in actuarial science and mathematical finance who want to learn stochastic control within an insurance setting, but it will also appeal to applied probabilists interested in the insurance applications and to practitioners who want to learn more about how the method works.

Readers should be familiar with basic probability theory and have a working knowledge of Brownian motion, Markov processes, martingales and stochastic calculus. Some knowledge of measure theory will also be useful for following the proofs.