A Class of Designs for Sequential Clinical Trials
Abstract In a situation comparing the effectiveness of two clinical treatments, eligible subjects come to an experimental site sequentially and must be treated at once. In order to reduce different kinds of experimental bias and also increase the precision of inferences about treatment effects, a class of designs which offers a compromise between perfect balance and complete randomization is proposed and analyzed in this article. These new designs have the desirable property of forcing a small-sized experiment to be balanced while tending toward a complete randomization scheme as the size of the experiment increases.