ON THE CONVOLUTION OF EXPONENTIAL DISTRIBUTIONS

The distribution of the sum of n independent random variables having exponential distributions with different parameters ${\beta}_i$ ($i=1,2,{\ldots},n$) is given in [2], [3], [4] and [6]. In [1], by using Laplace transform, Jasiulewicz and Kordecki generalized the results obtained by Sen and Balakrishnan in [6] and established a formula for the distribution of this sum without conditions on the parameters ${\beta}_i$. The aim of this note is to present a method to find the distribution of the sum of n independent exponentially distributed random variables with different parameters. Our method can also be used to handle the case when all ${\beta}_i$ are the same.