On partially Schur-constant models and their associated copulas

Abstract Schur-constant vectors are used to model duration phenomena in various areas of economics and statistics. They form a particular class of exchangeable vectors and, as such, rely on a strong property of symmetry. To broaden the field of applications, partially Schur-constant vectors are introduced which correspond to partially exchangeable vectors. First, their copulas of survival, said to be partially Archimedean, are explicitly obtained and analyzed. Next, much attention is devoted to the construction of different partially Schur-constant models with two groups of exchangeable variables. Finally, partial Schur-constancy is briefly extended to the modeling of nested and multi-level dependencies.