The proportional reversed hazards model consists in describing random failure times by a family {[F(x)][theta], [theta]0} of distribution functions, where F(x) is a baseline distribution function. We show various results on this model related to some topics in reliability theory, including...

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...

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...

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...