A one-parameter version of the generalised Poisson distribution provided by Consul and Jain (1973) is considered in this paper. The distribution is unimodal with a zero vertex and over-dispersed. A generalised linear model related to this distribution is also presented. Its parameters can be estimated by using a Fisher-Scoring algorithm which is equivalent to iteratively reweighted least squares. Due to its flexibility and capacity to describe highly skewed data with an excessive number of zeros, the model is suitable to be applied in insurance settings as an alternative to the negative binomial and zero-inflated model.

We characterize the (continuous) majorization of integrable functions introduced by Hardy, Littlewood, and Pólya in terms of the (discrete) majorization of finite-dimensional vectors, introduced by the same authors. The most interesting version of this result is the characterization of the (increasing) convex order for integrable random variables in terms of majorization of vectors of expected order statistics. Such a result includes, as particular cases, previous results by Barlow and Proschan and by Alzaid and Proschan, and, in a sense, completes the picture of known results on order statistics. Applications to other stochastic orders are also briefly considered.

We study exponential families within the class of counting processes and show that a mixed Poisson process belongs to an exponential family if and only if it is either a Poisson process or has a gamma structure distribution. This property can be expressed via exponential martingales.

When a random electrical network has the structure of a rooted tree and the edge resistances are either inverse Gaussian or reciprocal inverse Gaussian random variables then, subject to some restrictions, the overall resistance of the network is shown to follow a reciprocal inverse Gaussian distribution.

In this paper, we consider the life distribution H(t) of a device subject to shocks governed by a finite mixture of homogeneous Poisson processes. It will be shown that if (pk), the probabilities that the device fails on the kth shock, has a discrete phase-type (DPH) distribution, then H(t) is continuous phase-type (CPH). The relationship between the mean values of (pk) and H(t) is established.