A METHOD TO MINIMIZE THE SUM OF THE VARIANCES OF THE ESTIMATORS OF THE VARIANCE COMPONENTS IN STAIR NESTED DESIGNS

Stair nested designs may be a good alternative to balanced nested designs since we can work with fewer observations and the amount of information for the different factors is more evenly distributed. In stair nested designs the number of treatments is the sum of the "actice" factor levels so these designs lead to a great economy. A method will be used to minimize the sum of the variances of the estimators of the variance components.