The following monograph deals with the approximate stochastic behavior of a system consisting of a sequence of servers in series with finite storage between consecutive servers. The methods employ deterministic queueing and diffusion approximations which are valid under conditions in which the storages and the queue lengths are typically large compared with 1. One can disregard the fact that the customer counts must be integer valued and treat the queue as if it were a (stochastic) continuous fluid. In these approximations, it is not necessary to describe the detailed probability distribution of service times; it suffices simply to specify the rate of service and the variance rate (the variance of the number served per unit time). Specifically, customers are considered to originate from an infinite reservoir. They first pass through a server with service rate ~O' vari ance rate ~O' into a storage of finite capacity c . They then pass l through a server with service rate ~l' variance rate ~l' into a storage of capacity c ' etc., until finally, after passing through an nth server, 2 they go into an infinite reservoir (disappear). If any jth storage become , n , the service at the j-lth server is interrupted full j = 1, 2, and, of course, if a jth storage becomes empty the jth server is inter rupted; otherwise, services work at their maximum rate.

The present 'Introductory Lectures on Arbitrage-based Financial Asset Pricing' are a first attempt to give a comprehensive presentation of Arbitrage Theory in a discrete time framework (by the way: all the re sults given in these lectures apply to a continuous time framework but, probably, in continuous time we could achieve stronger results - of course at the price of stronger assumptions). It has been turned out in the last few years that capital market theory as derived and evolved from the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) in the middle sixties, can, to an astonishing extent, be based on arbitrage arguments only, rather than on mean-variance preferences of investors. On the other hand, ar bitrage arguments provided access to a wider range of results which could not be obtained by standard CAPM-methods, e. g. the valuation of contingent claims (derivative assets) Dr the_ investigation of futures prices. To some extent the presentation will loosely follow historical lines. A selected set of capital asset pricing models will be derived according to their historical progress and their increasing complexity as well. It will be seen that they all share common structural properties. After having made this observation the presentation will become an axiomatical one: it will be stated in precise terms what arbitrage is about and what the consequences are if markets do not allow for risk-free arbitrage opportunities. The presentation will partly be accompanied by an illus trating example: two-state option pricing.