Optimal decision-analytic designs are deterministic. Such designs are appropriately criticized in the context of clinical trials because they are subject to assignment bias. On the other hand, balanced randomized designs may assign an excessive number of patients to a treatment arm that is...

Consider designing a clinical trial in stages, with two treatments and N exchangeable patients to be treated. Responses are dichotomous. The problem is to decide how large each stage should be and how many patients should be assigned to each treatment during each stage. Information is updated...

A Bayesian adaptive design is proposed for a comparative two-armed clinical trial using decision-theoretic approaches. A loss function is specified, based on the cost for each patient and the costs of making incorrect decisions at the end of a trial. At each interim analysis, the decision to...