A note on testing for exponentiality

In this note some extensions are made to previous work by a number of authors on the development of tests for exponentiality. The most recent example is due to Fercho and Ringer in which they compare the small sample powers of a few well-known test statistics for the hypothesis of a constant failure rate. It is the primary intent of this current work to extend Gnedenko's F test to situations with hypercensoring and to provide guidance for its use, particularly when a log-normal distribution is the alternative.     

State-dependent gap acceptance

This paper considers a traffic problem in which vehicles queue up according to a Poisson process on a single-lane entrance ramp prior to merging into a major stream of vehicular traffic. In order to then prevent the ramp queue from becoming too large, a model is proposed which considers a lowering of the critical gap as the ramp queue size increases. With the critical gap assumed to be a nonincreasing function of the number of vehicles on the ramp at instances that correspond to departure times of lead vehicles from the ramp queue, the resultant model is an M/G/1 queue with state-dependent service times. Some general results are obtained for this model and a specific case discussed in moderate detail.     

A theory of war economies

This article presents a proposed theory of how war economies are formed and maintained, as well as an integrated policy framework to guide the dismantling of war economies emanating from the proposed theory. Additionally, six potential areas for future research pertaining to the dismantling of war economies are also presented.     

Book reviews

Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny. By Joshua Muravchik, American Enterprise Institute (1991) ISSN 0–8447–3734–8. $12.95.

Generals in the Palacio. By Roderick Ai Camp. Oxford University Press, (1992), ISBN 0–19–507300–2, £45.

L'Armement en France. Genèse, Ampleur et Coût d'une Industrie By François Chesnais and Claude Serfati, Editions Nathan, Collection Economie/Sciences Sociales, Paris (1992), ISBN 2–09–190086–9.

The Têt Offensive. Intelligence Failure in War. By James Wirtz, Cornell University Press, New York (1991), ISBN 0–8014–2486–0. $38.50.

Restructuring of arms producton in Western Europe. Edited by Michael Brzoska and Peter Lock. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1992), ISBN 0–1982–9147–7. £25.00.

What is Proper Soldiering? A study of new perspectives for the future uses of the Armed Forces of the 1990s. By Michael Harbottle. The Centre for International Peacebuilding, Chipping Norton (1992), £3.50.

The Strategic Defence Initiative By Edward Reiss, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1992), ISBN 0–521–41097–5. £30.00.     

British Armour and rearmament in the 1930s

This paper considers the contribution of military publishing to the nineteenth-century military revolution leading to the Great War. The subject is addressed in four contexts. The first is informational, analyzing the role of military publications in making available data and ideas that increased military effectiveness. The second is syncretic, evaluating the effect of military publications on cohesion within increasingly large, complex armies, and between armies and their societies. The third is internal. It discusses the contributions to professional insecurity generated by print, and by its electronic extensions the telegraph and the telephone. Finally, the paper considers the print revolution's influence on actual war-fighting     

Book review

The politics and economics of defence industries: E. Inbar and B. Zilberfarb (eds), Frank Cass Publishers, London and Portland, Oregon, 1998, pp. xviii+225.

Russia and the Arms Trade: Ian Anthony (ed.), Oxford University Press, SIPRI, 1998, pp. xiv+304.     

Offsets as industrial policy: Lessons from aerospace

Since 1975 “offsets” have begun to appear frequently in contracts covering international sales of aircraft and other products incorporating advanced technology. Offsets involve reciprocity beyond that normally found in an exchange of goods for money. They may involve co‐production or co‐design of the principal item to be exchanged, or acceptance by the seller of goods or services unrelated to it as partial payment (indirect offsets or countertrade).

The United States has become the major provider of offsets and anti‐offset sentiment has grown. Economists interpret them as trade diverting. Politicians from regions suffering loss of employment view them as bestowing unfair advantage to foreign competitors.

The authors examine offsets from both theoretical and policy perspectives and conclude that in such noncompetitive markets, second‐best considerations dominate, requiring case‐by‐case evaluation of impacts and rendering across‐the‐board determinations of welfare loss suspect.     

Sequential tests for hypotheses concerning the product of poisson parameters with applications to problems in reliability and biometry

Sequential tests for the product of Poisson parameters based on the generalized incomplete modified Bessel (g.i.m.B.) distributions are given. Applications to reliability and biometry are indicated.