Relative efficiency of the case-control to the cohort design in epidemiology

In deriving the efficiency of the stratified to the simple random sample design in survey research, the critical link between the designs is the population analysis of variance. Analogously, the efficiency of the case-control to the cohort design in epidemiologic research can be derived using Bayes' theorem as the essential connection between the designs. Prior information on the odds of the disease is also required. A numerical example using data from Fleiss' text is used to illustrate the result.