The estimation of P(S-n u) by simulation, where S, is the sum of independent. identically distributed random varibles Y-1,..., Y-n, is of importance in many applications. We propose two simulation estimators based upon the identity P(S-n u) = nP(S, u, M-n = Y-n), where M-n = max(Y-1,...,...

We consider a model of a financial corporation which has to find an optimal policy balancing its risk and expected profits. The example treated in this paper is related to an insurance company with the risk control method known in the industry as excess-of-loss reinsurance. Under this scheme the...

In a bonus-malus system in car insurance, the bonus class of a customer is updated from one year to the next as a function of the current class and the number of claims in the year (assumed Poisson). Thus the sequence of classes of a customer in consecutive years forms a Markov chain, and most...

Consider the American put and Russian option (Ann. Appl. Probab. 3 (1993) 603; Theory Probab. Appl. 39 (1994) 103; Ann. Appl. Probab. 3 (1993) 641) with the stock price modeled as an exponential Lévy process. We find an explicit expression for the price in the dense class of Lévy processes with...

Consider a random walk or Lévy process {St} and let [tau](u) = inf {t[greater-or-equal, slanted]0 : St u}, P(u)(·) = P(· [tau](u) < [infinity]). Assuming that the upwards jumps are heavy-tailed, say subexponential (e.g. Pareto, Weibull or lognormal), the asymptotic form of the P(u)-distribution of the process {St} up to time [tau](u) is described as u --> [infinity]. Essentially, the results confirm the folklore that level crossing occurs as result of one big jump. Particular sharp conclusions are obtained for...</[infinity]).>

We study the tail asymptotics of the r.v. X(T) where {X(t)} is a stochastic process with a linear drift and satisfying some regularity conditions like a central limit theorem and a large deviations principle, and T is an independent r.v. with a subexponential distribution. We find that the tail...