Sharp large deviation estimates for heavy-tailed extrema

Abstract

We establish sharp large deviation asymptotics for the maximum order statistic of independent and identically distributed heavy-tailed random variables, valid for all Borel subsets of the right tail. This result yields exact decay rates for exceedance probabilities at thresholds that grow faster than the natural extreme-value scaling. As an application, we derive the polynomial rate of decay of ruin probabilities in insurance portfolios where insolvency is driven by a single extreme claim.