Abstract
Abstract A decision theoretic approach to the design of a clinical trial is considered for the situation in which a total of N patients with a disease receive one of two treatments and the responses to the treatments are dichotomous. Two costs are considered: The cost of treating a patient with the inferior treatment and the cost of conducting the trial. Minimax and Bayes procedures are used to determine the optimum size of a fixed sample trial. Bayes solutions for the optimum sample size are given for a variety of beta prior distributions and various values of N. Minimax solutions are given for a variety of regions over which the minimaxing was performed, and for various values of N. The optimum sample sizes are found to be asymptotically proportional to N 1/2 using the Bayes procedure and N 2/3 using the minimax procedure. The consequences of erring in specifying the value of N are explored.
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