Some Remarks on Exponential Families

Abstract The following facts may serve to provide a feeling about how restrictive the assumption of an exponential family is. (a) A one-parameter exponential family in standard form with respect to Lebesgue measure is a location parameter family iff it is normal with fixed variance. (b) It is a scale parameter family iff it is gamma with fixed shape parameter. Both facts are known (see Borges and Pfanzagl 1965; Ferguson 1962; Lindley 1958) but may not have received as much attention as they deserve. Under the assumption of differentiable densities, short and elementary proofs are given.