  We study randomized and quantum efficiency lower bounds in communication
complexity. These arise from the study of zero-communication protocols in which
players are allowed to abort. Our scenario is inspired by the physics setup of
Bell experiments, where two players share a predefined entangled state but are
not allowed to communicate. Each is given a measurement as input, which they
perform on their share of the system. The outcomes of the measurements should
follow a distribution predicted by quantum mechanics; however, in practice, the
detectors may fail to produce an output in some of the runs. The efficiency of
the experiment is the probability that the experiment succeeds (neither of the
detectors fails).
  When the players share a quantum state, this gives rise to a new bound on
quantum communication complexity (eff*) that subsumes the factorization norm.
When players share randomness instead of a quantum state, the efficiency bound
(eff), coincides with the partition bound of Jain and Klauck. This is one of
the strongest lower bounds known for randomized communication complexity, which
subsumes all the known combinatorial and algebraic methods including the
rectangle (corruption) bound, the factorization norm, and discrepancy.
  The lower bound is formulated as a convex optimization problem. In practice,
the dual form is more feasible to use, and we show that it amounts to
constructing an explicit Bell inequality (for eff) or Tsirelson inequality (for
eff*). We give an example of a quantum distribution where the violation can be
exponentially bigger than the previously studied class of normalized Bell
inequalities.
  For one-way communication, we show that the quantum one-way partition bound
is tight for classical communication with shared entanglement up to arbitrarily
small error.
