New $L^2$-type exponentiality tests.

We introduce new consistent and scale-free goodness-of-fit tests for the exponential distribution based on Puri-Rubin characterization. For the construction of test statistics we employ weighted $L^2$ distance between $V$-empirical Laplace transforms of random variables that appear in the characterization. The resulting test statistics are degenerate V-statistics with estimated parameters. We compare our tests, in terms of the Bahadur efficiency, to the likelihood ratio test, as well as some recent characterization based goodness-of-fit tests for the exponential distribution. We also compare the powers of our tests to the powers of some recent and classical exponentiality tests. In both criteria, our tests are shown to be strong and outperform most of their competitors.