Aspects of positive ageing

Abstract

The concept of positive ageing describes the adverse effects of age on the lifetime of units. Various aspects of this concept are described in terms of conditional probability distributions of residual lifetimes, failure rates, equilibrium distributions, etc. In this paper we further analyse this concept and relate it to stochastic dominance of first and higher orders. In the process we gain many insights and are able to define several new kinds of ageing criteria which supplement those existing in the literature.