Abstract
The risk in trial to compare two meical treatments is borne by patients who receive the inferior treatment during the experimental phase and by those remaining after the experiment who will all receive the inferior treatment if the results are misleading. An allocation rule s task is to balance these competing risks by deciding, during the course of the trial, when the experimental phase should be terminated. This paper compares the performance characteristics of various allocation rules that have been mentioned in the literature, and it seekds to correlate the structure of these and other allocation rules with their performance characteristics. Much use is made of computer based graphical techniques.

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