The inequality conjectured by van den Berg and Kesten in [9], and proved by Reimer in [6], states that for A and B events on S, a product of finitely many finite sets, and P any product measure on S,P(AÊB) <FONT FACE="Symbol">£</FONT> P(A)P(B), where AÊB are the elementary events which lie in both A and B for `disjoint...</font>

In the context of survival analysis, we define a covariate X as protective (detrimental) for the failure time T if the conditional distribution of [T | X = x] is stochastically increasing (decreasing) as a function of x. In the presence of another covariate Y, there exist situations where [T | X...