Remember that the MLE. is determined by the likelihood function. The only way in which the MLE. is allowed to depend on the sampling plan is through the likelihood function. If the decision about when to stop observing data is based solely on the the observations seen so far. then this information has already been included in the likelihood function. If the decision to stop is based on something else, one needs to evaluate the probability of that"something else" given each possible value of 0 and include that probability in the likelihood. other properties of MLEs will be discussed later in this chapter and in chapter 7