On limit laws for sums of Pfeifer records

The problem of determining limiting distributions for sums of records has been studied by several authors who have considered a variety of assumptions sufficient to ensure that sums of records properly normalized will converge to a non-degenerate distribution. As a parallel to these endeavors, it is of interest to establish conditions under which the sum of Pfeifer records, properly normalized, converges. Pfeifer records are defined under the assumption that initial observations are i.i.d. with common survival function and following the (n−1)-th record value the observations are assumed to have survival function ,n=1,2,.... The study of the asymptotic behavior of sums of Pfeifer records constitutes a natural generalization of work on sums of classical records. The present paper introduces conditions under which the limit distribution of sums of Pfeifer records is non-degenerate.