نقش آموزش در رفتار مصرف کننده در بازار بیمه The role of education on consumer behavior on the insurance market

1. Introduction The behavior of the consumer of insurance services is influenced to a large extent by numerous factors that can be classified in several categories: situational factors (factors appearing in all the phases of the decisional process: before the acquisition of the insurance policy, during the acquisition and after the purchase), factors related to the marketing activity of insurance companies (among which we can mention the impact of the promotional politics of insurance companies, the characteristics of the insurance products and distribution of insurance services, factors related to the premiums paid and the payment facilities offered by the insurance companies, factors related to the influence of the personnel of insurance companies), factors from the external environment (natural, demographical, economical, legislative and technological factors), elements related to the sociological particularities of consumers (in this category, culture, social class, reference group and family are important factors) and factors reflecting the individual characteristics of potential insurance consumers, such as age, stage in the life cycle, gender, employment, economic status and last but not least: the education of the person. In this paper, we have focused on the influence of individual characteristics of potential insurance consumers. Employment is one of the most important factors influencing insurance coverage, but education is interactive with other occupational characteristics, and is associated with differences in employment earnings and benefits due to resulting labor market choices. The potential consumers with elementary education have average revenues lower than the revenues of potential consumers with higher education. So, prior researches have shown that fully employed persons with higher levels of formal education are more likely to have insurance (Dewar, 1998).