A Method to Decide Whether the Efficacy of the Test Drug is Equal to or Higher than the Standard Drug

Abstract

To test the clinical usefulness of new drugs, the efficacy of the new drugs are often compared with that of the standard drugs. The criterion to adopt the test drug is generally accepted to be that “the efficacy of the test drug is egual to or higher than that of the standard drug.”
However, the statistical interpretation of the above criterion is not so clear, for it is not possible to test the equality of efficacy by statistical methods.
In this paper, based on the fiducial argument, a method to make a decision in above situations is proposed and the procedure is illustrated by examples.