Economic design of sampling plans with multi‐decision alternatives

For situations where there are several markets with different profit‐cost structures, economic attributes sampling plans are developed for determining the market to ship the lot to. Two sampling plans are considered; the fixed‐size sampling plan with several levels of acceptance numbers, and the inverse sampling plan with several levels of sample sizes. Linear profit models are constructed which involve four profit/cost components; profit from a conforming item, inspection cost, replacement cost, and cost from an accepted nonconforming item. For fixed‐size and inverse sampling plans, methods of finding optimal sampling plans are presented and examples with beta‐binomial prior distributions are given.