We investigate the probabilistic evolution of a near-critical bisexual branching process with mating depending on the number of couples in the population. We determine sufficient conditions which guarantee either the almost sure extinction of such a process or its survival with positive probability. We also establish some limiting results concerning the sequences of couples, females, and males, suitably normalized. In particular, gamma, normal, and degenerate distributions are proved to be limit laws. The results also hold for bisexual Bienaymé–Galton–Watson processes, and can be adapted to other classes of near-critical bisexual branching processes.

In this paper, we investigate the asymptotic behaviour of controlled branching processes with random control functions. In a critical case, we establish sufficient conditions for both their almost-sure extinction and for their nonextinction with a positive probability. For some suitably chosen norming constants, we also determine different kinds of limiting behaviour for this class of processes.

Grenander et al. (1991) proposed a conditional cyclic Gaussian Markov random field model for the edges of a closed outline in the plane. In this paper the model is recast as an improper cyclic Gaussian Markov random field for the vertices. The limiting behaviour of this model when the vertices become closely spaced is also described and in particular its relationship with the theory of ‘snakes' (Kass et al. 1987) is established. Applications are given in Grenander et al. (1991), Mardia et al. (1991) and Kent et al. (1992).

A new queueing system called G/G/{p} is introduced and studied. In this queue, unlike standard queues, the customers after being served are allowed to become servers themselves. More precisely, at the completion of his service each customer is assumed to become a server with probability p or leave the system with probability 1 – p, independent of everything else. We make some comparisons about the waiting times and queue sizes among different queueing systems. We also study the joint distribution of the queue size, the number of servers and the number of departures at time t for exact and asymptotic behavior for large t.

This paper considers the discrete time Markov decision model with a denumerable state space and finite action space. Under certain conditions it is proved that the minimal total expected cost for a planning horizon of n epochs minus n times the minimal long-run average expected cost per unit time has a finite limit as n → ∞ for each initial state.