Empirical Bayes methods are becoming increasingly popular in statistics. Robbins (1955) introduced the method in the context of nonparametric estimation of a completely unspecified prior distribution. Subsequently, the method has been explored very successfully in a series of articles by Efron and Morris (1973, 1975, 1977) in a parametric framework. In the Efron—Morris setup, a family of parametric distributions is used as possible priors, but only when one or more of the parameters of the family of prior distributions is estimated from the data. Morris (1983) listed a number of areas where empirical Bayes methods are used.