Giovanni Latorre

SUMMARY This work proposes the use of the Dagum model (Dagum, 1977) in the reliability theory. The main motivation is that the hazard rate of this model is very flexible; in fact, it is proved (Domma, 2002) that, according to the values of the parameters, the hazard rate of the Dagum distribution has a decreasing, or an Upside-down Bathtub, or Bathtub and then Upside-down Bathtub failure rate. This work studies some features of the Dagum distribution as the reversed hazard rate, the mean and variance of the random variables residual life and reversed residual life and their monotonicity properties. Two published data sets have been analyzed for illustrative purposes. Keywords: Burr III distribution, Reversed Hazard Function, Mean Residual Life, Mean Waiting Time, Variance of Residual Life and Reversed Residual Life.