Performance Analysis with Truncated Heavy-Tailed Distributions

This paper deals with queues and insurance risk processes where a generic service time, resp. generic claim, has the form U ∧ K for some r.v. U with distribution B which is heavy-tailed, say Pareto or Weibull, and a typically large K, say much larger than . We study the compound Poisson ruin probability ψ(u) or, equivalently, the tail of the M/G/1 steady-state waiting time W. In the first part of the paper, we present numerical values of ψ(u) for different values of K by using the classical Siegmund algorithm as well as a more recent algorithm designed for heavy-tailed claims/service times, and compare the results to different approximations of ψ(u) in order to figure out the threshold between the light-tailed regime and the heavy-tailed regime. In the second part, we investigate the asymptotics as K → ∞ of the asymptotic exponential decay rate γ = γ ^(K) in a more general truncated Lévy process setting, and give a discussion of some of the implications for the approximations. AMS 2000 Subject Classification Primary 68M20, Secondary 60K25 †Partially supported by MaPhySto—A Network in Mathematical Physics and Stochastics, founded by the Danish National Research Foundation. An erratum to this article is available at .