Recent works have shown how tail events could account for financial anomalies such as the equity premiumpuzzle. These models do not explore, however, why investors would discount tail risk so heavily. We take on this challenge by designing a novel tail-event experiment to assess both investors'...

We study the reaction of investors to tail events across trading institutions. We conduct experiments in which investors bid on a financial asset that delivers a small positive reward in more than 99% of the cases and a large loss otherwise. The baseline treatment uses a repeated BDM mechanism...