Adversarial life testing

SUMMARY The life testing of items that exhibit a distribution of times to failure is undertaken for making decisions such as design qualification and reliability demonstration. In such contexts, procedures based on the Bayesian paradigm have assumed a common prior distribution of item reliability by both the consumer and the manufacturer. In this paper we consider the adversarial situation wherein both parties agree on a statistical model for lifetimes but use different prior distributions. We require that the consumer's criteria for acceptance and rejection be known to the manufacturer. We illustrate our approach via the case of exponentially distributed life lengths and relate it to the approach specified in standard MIL STD 781C.