The evolutionarily stable strategy for a given payoff matrix contest, although originally determined in terms of a haploid population, has been shown elsewhere to correspond to an equilibrium of the mean strategy of a diploid population. In this note, the equilibrium is shown to be locally stable for diploid populations. This local stability is demonstrated primarily by relating the behaviour of the perturbed diploid population to one, or in some cases two, associated haploid populations.

The assumption of arbitrary and biologically implausible inheritance patterns in sexual diploid populations can yield population models in which convergence of a population's mean strategy to an evolutionarily stable strategy will not occur, even though this strategy is attainable with the correct choice of gametic frequencies. The present paper investigates the effect of imposing a simplifying and biologically reasonable restriction on the assumed inheritance patterns; namely, that dominance or underdominance occurs.

We consider Weiss's and Downton's models with parametersπ, αand β depending on i number of susceptibles and j number of carriers. A martingale argument is performed when πand α /β only depend on i or, in Weiss's case, when α /β is the product of a function of i by a function of j. In these cases the martingale approach proves very valuable and gives explicit results quite easily. In particular it shows that well-known relations between moments and integrals along a trajectory are still true for any stopping time and for more general models than the classic ones.

The asymptotic sizes and compositions of critical general branching processes conditioned on non-extinction are treated. First, results are given for processes counted with random characteristics allowed to depend on the whole daughter processes, then these are used to derive conditional limit theorems for the pedigrees of randomly sampled individuals among populations counted with 0–1-valued characteristics. The limiting stable pedigrees have nice independence structures and are easily derived from the original branching laws.

In the familiar immigration–birth–death process the events of immigration, birth and death relate to the individual. There are processes in which the whole family and not just an individual migrates. Such population growth models are studied in some detail.

Existing results on the asymptotic behaviour of solutions to two dynamic programming equations involving non-negative matrices are reviewed and strengthened in certain directions. The results are then applied to strategies for harvesting of a small population so as to optimise its survival potential in a limited environment.

The response of the photographic grain to light is a non-deterministic process which is as yet not completely understood. This response, as measured by the photographic density, is usually taken to be a function of the product of incident light intensity and exposure time interval duration, but at extreme values of either of these two quantities, this is no longer true. This latter effect is called reciprocity-law failure.

This paper discusses a probabilistic model, similar to a multiserver queue, for high-intensity reciprocity failure.

Let N(t) be a birth-death process on N = {0,1,2,· ··} governed by the transition rates λn > 0 (n ≧ 0) and μ η > 0 (n ≧ 1). Let mTm be the conditional first-passage time from r to n, given no visit to m where m <r < n. The downward conditional first-passage time nTm is defined similarly. It will be shown that , for any λn > 0 and μ η > 0. The limiting behavior of is considerably different from that of the ordinary first-passage time where, under certain conditions, exponentiality sets in as n →∞. We will prove that, when λn → λ > 0 and μ η → μ > 0 as n → ∞with ρ = λ /μ < 1, one has as r → ∞where TBP(λ,μ) is the server busy period of an M/M/1 queueing system with arrival rate λand service rate μ.

Kac's formula for Brownian functionals and Levy's local time decomposition are shown to be useful tools in analysing Brownian excursion properties. These tools are applied to maximum, local time and area distributions. Some curious connections between some of these distributions are explained by simple probabilistic arguments.

The first-passage time of a Markov process to a moving barrier is considered as a first-exit time for a vector whose components include the process and the barrier. Thus when the barrier is itself a solution of a differential equation, the theory of first-exit times for multidimensional processes may be used to obtain differential equations for the moments and density of the first-passage time of the process to the barrier. The procedure is first illustrated for first-passage-time problems where the solutions are known. The mean first-passage time of an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process to an exponentially decaying barrier is then found by numerical solution of a partial differential equation. Extensions of the method to problems involving Markov processes with discontinuous sample paths and to cases where the process is confined between two moving barriers are also discussed.

This paper deals with the Foster–Pakes model for Galton–Watson branching processes allowing immigration whenever the number of particles is 0. In the critical case we investigate the asymptotic behaviour of the probability of non-extinction, of the expectation and of the variance, and obtain different types of limit theorems depending on the temporally-decreasing sizes of the immigrants.

A two-dimensional lattice random walk is studied in which, at each stage, the direction of the next step is correlated to that of the previous step. An exact expression is obtained from the characteristic function for the dispersion matrix of the n-step transition probabilities, and the limiting diffusion equation is derived.

The Poisson process is regarded as a point process of rare events because of the classical result that the number of successes in a sequence of Bernoulli trials is asymptotically Poisson as the probability of a success tends to 0. It is shown that this rareness property of the Poisson process is characteristic of any infinitely divisible point process or random measure with independent increments. These processes and measures arise as limits of certain rarefactions of compound point processes: purely atomic random measures with uniformly null atom sizes. Examples include thinnings and partitions of point processes.

We consider a branching-process model {Zn}, where the law of offspring distribution depends on the population size. We consider the case when the means mn (mn is the mean of offspring distribution when the population size is equal to n) tend to a limit m > 1 as n →∞. For a certain class of processes {Zn} necessary conditions for convergence in L1 and L2 and sufficient conditions for almost sure convergence and convergence in L2 of Wn = Zn/mn are given.

Joint densities concerning in particular the value and time of the maximum over a fixed time interval, or the behavior over intervals determined by some first- and last-passage times, are determined for Brownian motion, the three-dimensional Bessel process and Brownian meander. Simple change of measure formulas permit easy passage from one process to the other. Examples are given.

In a planar percolation model, faces of the underlying graph, as well as the sites and bonds, may be viewed as random elements. With this viewpoint, Whitney duality allows construction of a planar dual percolation model for each planar percolation model, which applies to mixed models with sites, bonds, and faces open or closed at random. Using self-duality for percolation models on the square lattice, information is obtained about the percolative region in the mixed model.

The asymptotic behavior of the maximum likelihood estimator of a parameter in the drift term of a stationary ergodic diffusion process is studied under conditions in which the true drift function and true noise function do not coincide with those specified by the parametric model.

An index lying between 0 and 1 is presented to describe the degree of liberation (or separation) of one component of a particulate material. It is shown how the index is related to the covariance function of the material, the distribution of shapes and sizes of the particles and to the interaction between fracture surfaces and the structure of the material. The variation of the index with the extent of crushing is investigated, together with the problem of stereological estimation. The index is evaluated for some particular probability models.

We present necessary and sufficient conditions for the weak convergence of the distributions of the kth order statistics from a strictly stationary strong-mixing sequence of random variables to limit laws which are represented in terms of a compound Poisson distribution. The obtained limit laws form a class larger than that occurring in the independent case.

The strong law of large numbers of the Marcinkiewicz–Zygmund type is established for the total population in a subcritical branching process with immigration. The moment convergence of the total population is obtained under appropriate moment conditions on the offspring distribution and the immigration distribution.