Table 1.

Monte Carlo study. The table presents the mean estimate, the square root of the empirical mean square error, empirical absolute bias and empirical standard deviation, based on 400 simulations for each of the sample sizes. The first block of the table is for n = 8 while the second is for n = 16.

parameter	value	estimate	sqrtMSE	absBIAS	s.d.
k	5	4.7876	0.2440	0.2121	0.1207
s	0.05	0.0574	0.0076	0.0073	0.0020
d	0.02	0.0195	0.0011	0.0004	0.0010
a	4×10−9	3.3609×10−9	6.9739×10−10	6.3405×10−10	2.9039×10−10
r	3×105	298 637	214 233	108	214 230
k	5	5.1958	0.3656	0.1895	0.3127
s	0.05	0.0487	0.0045	0.0011	0.0044
d	0.02	0.0210	0.0019	0.0010	0.0016
a	4×10−9	3.9405×10−9	1.7755×10−10	6.2554×10−11	1.6617×10−10
r	3×105	294 503	99 494	6786	99 262