From an ethical standpoint,
clinical trials should utilize the evidence accumulated from the data
to assign more patients to the superior arm, so that more patients
will benefit from the better treatment. Response- or outcome-based
adaptive randomization aims to achieve this goal by skewing the number
of patients to a potentially better treatment group.
The play-the-winner rule attempts to allocate more patients to the potentially better treatment: staying with the winner until a failure outcome occurs and then switching to the alternative treatment [10]. This rule is often applied to the dichotomous cases, where the outcome is either a success or failure. In a study comparing two ...