Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2014
In a recent paper Seal (1980) calculated numerically survival probabilities based on Pareto claim distributions.
The Pareto density may be written as
Generalizing, the Pareto distribution may be regarded as a special case of the so-called beta-prime distribution (Keeping, 1962, p. 83) with density function
where B(p, q) = is the beta function.
In his paper Seal (1980, Appendix 1) arrived at a contradiction concerning this beta-prime distribution. He found on one side that all derivatives of the characteristic function exist at the origin and on the other side that only the moments of order n < q exist. In this note we will show that this contradiction is due to the use of an incorrect expression for the characteristic function of the beta-prime distribution, which was taken over from Johnson and Kotz (1970, Ch. 26) and Oberhettinger (1973, Table A).