The MLE of the mean of the exponential distribution based on grouped data is stochastically increasing

This paper refers to the problem stated by Balakrishnan et al. (2002). They proved that maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the exponential mean obtained from grouped samples is stochastically ordered provided that the sequence of the successive distances between inspection times is decreasing. In this paper we show that the assumption of monotonicity of the sequence of distances can be dropped.