A two-step rejection procedure for testing multiple hypotheses

This paper considers p-value based step-wise rejection procedures for testing multiple hypotheses. The existing procedures have used constants as critical values at all steps. With the intention of incorporating the exact magnitude of the p-values at the earlier steps into the decisions at the later steps, this paper applies a different strategy that the critical values at the later steps are determined as functions of the p-values from the earlier steps. As a result, we have derived a new equality and developed a two-step rejection procedure following that. The new procedure is a short-cut of a step-up procedure, and it possesses great simplicity. In terms of power, the proposed procedure is generally comparable to the existing ones and exceptionally superior when the largest p-value is anticipated to be less than 0.5. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.