Move-to-front rule is a heuristic updating a list of n items according to requests. Items are required with unknown probabilities (or popularities). The induced Markov chain is known to be ergodic. A main problem is the study of the distribution of the search cost defined as the position of the...

Mixture models for hazard rate functions are widely used tools for addressing the statistical analysis of survival data subject to a censoring mechanism. The present article introduced a new class of vectors of random hazard rate functions that are expressed as kernel mixtures of dependent...

Mixture models for hazard rate functions are widely used tools for addressing the statistical analysis of survival data subject to a censoring mechanism. The present paper introduces a new class of vectors of random hazard rate functions that are expressed as kernel mixtures of dependent...

We deal with strong consistency for Bayesian density estimation. An awkward consequence of inconsistency is described. It is pointed out that consistency at some density f-sub-0 depends on the prior mass assigned to the 'pathological' set of those densities that are close to f-sub-0, in a weak...

Random probability vectors are of great interest especially in view of their application to statistical inference. Indeed, they can be used for determining the de Finetti mixing measure in the representation of the law of a partially exchangeable array of random elements taking values in a...

The definition of vectors of dependent random probability measures is a topic of interest in applications to Bayesian statistics. They represent dependent nonparametric prior distributions that are useful for modelling observables for which specific covariate values are known. In this paper we...

This study explains the emergence of the Sicilian mafia in the XIX century as the product of the interaction between natural resource abundance and weak institutions. We advance the hypothesis that the mafia emerged after the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom in a context characterized by a severe...

The general elections held in February 2013 marked an earthquake in Italian politics. The two coalitions on the center-left and center-right that had governed Italy alternately between 1996 and 2011 together lost 11 million votes compared to the 2008 elections. The explanations advanced for this...

This paper empirically investigates complementarities between different sources of research funding with regard to academic publishing. We find for a sample of UK engineering academics that competitive funding is associated with an increase in ex-post publications but that industry funding...