Optimal reinsurance and dividend distribution policies in the Cramer-Lundberg model

We consider that the reserve of an insurance company follows a Cramer-Lundberg process. The management has the possibility of controlling the risk by means of reinsurance. Our aim is to find a dynamic choice of both the reinsurance policy and the dividend distribution strategy that maximizes the cumulative expected discounted dividend payouts. We study the usual cases of excess-of-loss and proportional reinsurance as well as the family of all possible reinsurance contracts. We characterize the optimal value function as the smallest viscosity solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and we prove that there exists an optimal band strategy. We also describe the optimal value function for small initial reserves.