Invariant Measures of Disagreement with Stochastic Dominance

E. del Barrio, J. A. Cuesta-Albertos and C. Matrán

The American Statistician, 2026, vol. 80, issue 2, 204-216

Abstract: Stochastic dominance has not been employed too often in practice due to its important limitations. To increase its versatility, the concept has recently been adapted by introducing various indices that measure the degree to which one probability distribution stochastically dominates another. In this article, starting from the fundamentals and using very simple examples, we present and discuss some of these indices when one intends to maintain invariance through increasing functions. This naturally leads to consideration of the appealing common representation, θ(F,G)=P(X>Y), where (X,Y) is a random vector with marginal distributions F and G. The indices considered here arise from different dependencies between X and Y. This includes the case of independent marginals, as well as other indices related to a contamination model or to a joint quantile representation. We emphasize the complementary role of some of these indices, which, in addition to measuring disagreement with respect to stochastic dominance, enable us to describe the maximum possible difference in the status of a value x∈R under F or G. We apply these indices to simulated and real-world datasets, exploring their practical advantages and limitations. The tour includes lesser-known facets of well-known statistics such as Mann-Whitney, one-tailed Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Galton’s rank statistics, even providing additional theory for the latter.

Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2025.2554737

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