Description: The author recommends the use of "minimally destructive scenarios" as part of an ORSA process, in order to deal with cognitive bias that can occur in risk decision-making. Part of the essay collection "Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA"

Description: People naturally observe risk in the form of the range of experienced gains and losses which is usually represented in statistical terms by standard deviation. In most cases, there are not enough observed values to reliably discern the true amount of losses that are possible in extreme situations. Statistical techniques that have long been applied to insurance company risks are being used to extrapolate from observed risk to extreme tails of the distribution of gains and losses. These processes are essentially an extrapolation from the “known” risk of volatility near the mean to “unknown” risk of extreme losses. “Fat tails” is a term often applied to risks where the likely losses in rare situations significantly exceeds the predictions of a Gaussian (“thin tailed”) distribution. This paper will look at the relationship between the observed risk and the extreme risk in statistical insurance r isk models and discuss how we might create a discussion among model users about the appropriateness of that relationship for specific types of risks.