In many fields of applications, test statistics are obtained by combining estimates from several experiments, studies or centres of a multicentre trial. The commonly used test procedure to judge the evidence of a common overall effect can result in a considerable overestimation of the...

The variance function of the optimal estimator of the overall mean in a heteroscedastic one-way ANOVA model is dominated by positive semi-definite quadratic functions. This makes it possible to develop closely related tests on the nullity of the overall mean parameter in one-way fixed and random...