Table 1.

Study design choices and effect parameter assumptions for the two example studies

Example study	Study variable	Simulated values
Tick burden survey	No of locations	10, 20, 50, 100, 200
	No of broods per location	2
	No of chicks per brood	3
	Mean tick burden per chick,	1, 5, 10
	Location-level variance,	0, 1
	Brood-level variance,	0, 0·7
	Chick-level variance,	0, 0·3
LLIN trial	No of rotations of the Latin square	1, 2, 3, 4, 5
	No of huts, No of nets, No of weeks per rotation	6
	No of A. gambiae entering each hut each night, nijk	5, 25
	Mortality using the control net,	70%
	Minimum acceptable mortality using LLIN type E1, (odds ratio, )	80% (1·7)
	Mortality assumed using the four secondary LLINs (odds ratio)	80% (1·7)
	Between-hut and -week variances,	0, 0·5
	Observation-level (overdispersion) variance,	0, 0·5, 1