Consider a general coherent system with independent or dependent components, and assume that the components are randomly chosen from two different stocks, with the components of the first stock having better reliability than the others. Then here we provide sufficient conditions on the...

For two semi-Markov positive skip-free processes on conditions are given such that the first-passage times from the reflecting state 0 to a preassigned threshold are ordered according to Laplace and to increasing linear orderings. A comparison of first-passage times is performed via the new...

On the basis of Kullback-Leibler discrimination information and of discrimination information introduced by Ebrahimi and Kirmani (Ann. Inst. Statist. Math. 48 (1996a) 257), we propose a measure of discrepancy between past-life distributions. Some properties of this measure are studied and a...

<Para ID="Par1">In order to take into account any possible dependence between alternatives in optimization problems, bivariate characterizations of some well-know univariate stochastic orders have been defined and studied by Shanthikumar and Yao (Adv Appl Probab 23:642–659, <CitationRef CitationID="CR15">1991</CitationRef>). These characterizations gave...</citationref></para>

In this note we compare bivariate additive models with respect to their Pearson correlation coefficients, Kendall’s τ concordance coefficients, and Blomqvist β medial correlation coefficients. The conditions that enable the comparisons involve variability stochastic orders such as the...