The Ayodhya aftermath: Hindu versus Muslim violence in Britain

This destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India, led to a week of unprecedented Hindu versus Muslim violence in the UK. Some Muslims, viewing Ayodhya as the latest manifestation of worldwide anti‐Islamic sentiment, today seek separation from mainstream British society as the best way to defend their interests. Many UK Hindus also desire to unite and strengthen their community by embracing the ‘fundamentalist’ politics of overseas organizations. Yet other British South Asians ‐ Hindu, Muslim and Sikh ‐ argue that only when all the country's ethnic minorities unite will their common enemies of racism and discrimination be defeated, and integration achieved.     

Implementation With Contingent Contracts

We study dominant strategy incentive compatibility in a mechanism design setting with contingent contracts where the payoff of each agent is observed by the principal and can be contracted upon. Our main focus is on the class of linear contracts (one of the most commonly used contingent contracts) which consist of a transfer and a flat rate of profit sharing. We characterize outcomes implementable by linear contracts and provide a foundation for them by showing that, in finite type spaces, every social choice function that can be implemented using a more general nonlinear contingent contract can also be implemented using a linear contract. We then qualitatively describe the set of implementable outcomes. We show that a general class of social welfare criteria can be implemented. This class contains social choice functions (such as the Rawlsian) which cannot be implemented using (uncontingent) transfers. Under additional conditions, we show that only social choice functions in this class are implementable.     

Power-normal distribution

Recently, Gupta and Gupta [Analyzing skewed data by power-normal model, Test 17 (2008), pp. 197–210] proposed the power-normal distribution for which normal distribution is a special case. The power-normal distribution is a skewed distribution, whose support is the whole real line. Our main aim of this paper is to consider bivariate power-normal distribution, whose marginals are power-normal distributions. We obtain the proposed bivariate power-normal distribution from Clayton copula, and by making a suitable transformation in both the marginals. Lindley–Singpurwalla distribution also can be used to obtain the same distribution. Different properties of this new distribution have been investigated in detail. Two different estimators are proposed. One data analysis has been performed for illustrative purposes. Finally, we propose some generalizations to multivariate case also along the same line and discuss some of its properties.     

Hybrid censoring schemes with exponential failure distribution

The mixture of Type I and Type I1 censoring schemes, called the hybrid censoring, is quite important in life–testing experiments. Epstein(1954, 1960) introduced this testing scheme and proposed a two–sided confidence interval to estimate the mean lifetime, θ, when the underlying lifetime distribution is assumed to be exponential. There are some two–sided confidence intervals and credible intervals proposed by Fairbanks et al. (1982) and Draper and Guttman (1987) respectively. In this paper we obtain the exact two–sided confidence interval of θ following the approach of Chen and Bhattacharya (1988). We also obtain the asymptotic confidence intervals in the Hybrid censoring case. It is important to observe that the results for Type I and Type II censoring schemes can be obtained as particular cases of the Hybrid censoring scheme. We analyze one data set and compare different methods by Monte Carlo simulations.     

Bayesian analysis for partially complete time and type of failure data

In this paper, we consider the Bayesian analysis of competing risks data, when the data are partially complete in both time and type of failures. It is assumed that the latent cause of failures have independent Weibull distributions with the common shape parameter, but different scale parameters. When the shape parameter is known, it is assumed that the scale parameters have Beta–Gamma priors. In this case, the Bayes estimates and the associated credible intervals can be obtained in explicit forms. When the shape parameter is also unknown, it is assumed that it has a very flexible log-concave prior density functions. When the common shape parameter is unknown, the Bayes estimates of the unknown parameters and the associated credible intervals cannot be obtained in explicit forms. We propose to use Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling technique to compute Bayes estimates and also to compute associated credible intervals. We further consider the case when the covariates are also present. The analysis of two competing risks data sets, one with covariates and the other without covariates, have been performed for illustrative purposes. It is observed that the proposed model is very flexible, and the method is very easy to implement in practice.     

Product market competition,agency cost and dividend payouts: new evidence from emerging market

Journal of Management and Governance - This paper examines the impact of product market competition on the dividend policy of Indian firms. We have taken product market competition as the proxy of...