The „Research Seminar Series“ held by the WU's Marketing Department helps to connect our Faculty with international scholars from the Marketing field. They are invited to present their latest research and discuss the current trends and developments in all major areas of marketing. The seminar is open to all WU faculties and students.

Talk by Gui Liberali, Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL)

Title: “Morphing Randomized Controlled Trials”

Abstract: Increasingly, large drug trials are under pressure to reduce their length and cost while also reducing potential harm to patients. The COVID-19 pandemic made the balance between speed of new drug development and statistical robustness in trials ever more relevant. Efficient experimental designs of trials of pharmaceutical drugs can reduce the pressure on health research funding and minimize patient harm because they require smaller samples than randomized controlled trials (RCT).  Based on past research on website morphing and adaptive online advertising, we propose a novel method that uses interim information to adapt clinical trials in real time,  balancing the trade-off between ‘drug discovery’ and ‘patient recovery’.  We evaluate our method by analyzing large-scale randomized controlled trials of a new treatment for myocardial infarction. The trial included 41,021 patients in 15 countries and 1,081 hospitals. Our method significantly outperforms traditional RCTs by reducing mortality at the required level of statistical power on the optimal treatment. We found that the use of our MAB would have increased patient beneficence by reliably identifying the best treatment, while saving lives and preventing cardiovascular events during the trial by reducing patient exposure to unfavorable treatments. We also present the application of our method to a out-patient second large-scale trial. We close with a discussion of implications for marketing problems that now rely on RCTs.

For all dates of the upcoming Marketing Research Seminar Series, please click here.

https://www.wu.ac.at/en/marketing/research/research-seminar-series/