While the importance of insurance is widely recognised, for individuals as well as for society as a whole, the number of individuals actually buying insurance is dramatically low. After stressing this concept in this paper we focus on the critical comparison between three strands of research: financial literacy, insurance literacy, and behavioural insurance literacy and decision-making. Through an in-depth analysis of previous studies and empirical evidence, we set the stage to adapt the various definitions of financial literacy to propose our own definition of insurance literacy as a three-dimensional construct, based on three key pillars: knowledge, skills, and understanding. Finally, we analyse the limits resulting from the lack of insurance literacy and the possible benefits literate consumers can achieve. While our paper is built around our theoretical proposal of a new definition of insurance literacy, it can constitute an incentive for other researchers to analyse more in-depth insurance-related decisions with empirical studies, based on our theoretical foundation. Our final goal is thus to pave the way ahead.

The research focuses on a sample of 26 Italian real estate asset management companies (Società di Gestione del Risparmio “SGR”)—whose asset management is totally linked to real estate funds—that considers a period of six years (2013–2018). Using some variables extrapolated from the internal accountability of each SGR, the analysis investigates possible relationships between them to verify the presence or absence of economies of scale of Italian real estate management companies by multivariate regressions. The results show that there is no single model for profit maximization and cost minimization, but all depends on the business model that each SGR decides to adopt.

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The conceptualisation of the insurance culture and the identification of a standard measuring instrument are the first steps towards defining a literate consumer. Obviously knowledge, understood as the ability to understand and use concepts in a conscious way, is considered to be a key variable for measuring the levels of many conceptual definitions of literacy, so also for insurance literacy. The aim of our research is precisely to verify the validity and reliability of a questionnaire that is composed of 7 questions that can represent a tool for measuring the level of insurance knowledge of consumers. The questions investigate the mere knowledge of insurance definitions and concepts, without going into too much detail about specific types of policies. To pursue this goal, a factor analysis has been conducted through a sample that is composed of 274 Italian respondents. The results show that those items are able to measure the basic insurance knowledge of a consumer.