VOLUME l. APPLIED PROBABILITY

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

PREFACE

A.	PROBABILITY AND PROBABILISTIC METHODS

F.T. Bruss and T.S. Ferguson. Half-prophets and Robbins’ problem of minimizing
   the expected rank	1
M. Cramer and L. Rueschendorf. Analysis of recursive algorithms by the
   contraction method	18
K.R. Parthasarathy. Comparison of completely positive maps on a C*algebra
   and a Lebesgue decomposition theorem	34
P. Picard and C. Lefevre. Abel expansions and generalized Abel polynomials
   in stochastic models	55
M. Scarsini and M. Shaked. Positive dependence orders: a survey	70

B.	MARKOV AND OTHER STOCHASTIC PROCESSES

0.	Chryssaphinou and S. Papastavridis. A Poisson limit on the number of
   appearances of a pattern in a Markov chain	92
D. Ghosh and A.P. Godbole. Palindromes in random letter generation: Poisson
   approximations, rates of growth and Erdos-Renyi laws	99
A.G. Hart and P.K. Pollett. Direct analytical methods for determining
   quasistationary distributions for continuous-time Markov chains	116
G. Kersting and F.C. Klebaner. Explosions in Markov processes and submartingale
   convergence	127
J.S. Kwon and R. Pyke. Probability bounds for product Poisson process	137
C. Lefevre and P. Picard. On the first-crossing of a Poisson process on a
   lower boundary	159
D.J. Scott and R.L. Tweedie. Explicit rates of convergence of stochastically
   ordered Markov chains	176
M.N. Slavtchova-Bojkova. Multi-type age-dependent branching processes with
   state-dependent immigration	192
P.-C.G. Vassiliou. The nonhomogenous semi-Markov system in a stochastic
   environment	206
G.P. Yanev and N.M. Yanev. Branching processes with two types of emigration and
   state-dependent immigration	216

C.	BIOMATHEMATICAL MODELS
W.J. Ewens. Remarks on the law of succession	229
F. Papangelou. Large deviations of the Wright-Fisher process	245

D.	EPIDEMIC MODELS

F.	Ball. Threshold behaviour in stochastic epidemics among households 253
N.G. Becker and K. Dietz. Reproduction numbers and critical immunity levels
	for epidemics in a community of households	267
J. Gani. Modelling the spread of HIV in prisons	277
M.	Neuts and J.-M. Li. An algorithmic study of S-I-R stochastic epidemic models . . . 295

E.	FINANCIAL MODELS
B. Gamrowski and S.T. Rachev. Testing the validity of value-at-work measures	307
A. Rejman and A. Weron. Option pricing for hyperbolic CRR model	321
G. Samorodnitsky. A class of shot noise models for financial applications	332
P. Whittle. Why discount? The rationale of discounting in optimization
   problems
F. RANDOM WALKS AND QUEUES
J.W. Cohen. On periodic Pollaczek waiting time processes	361
M. Kotulski and K. Weron. Random walk approach to relaxation in disordered
   systems	379
G. SPATIAL MODELS
I.V. Basawa. Inference for a class of causal spatial models	389
Y.Y. Kagan and D. Vere-Jones. Problems in the modelling and statistical
   analysis of earthquakes	398

H.	INFERENCE
A.	Dannwerth and D. Plachky. On the existence of UMVU estimators for Bernoulli
	 experiments in the non-identically distributed case with applications to the
	 randomized response method and the unrelated question model	426
L.	Takacs. On a three-sample test	433