Inequality measurement with an ordinal and continuous variable

Nicolas Gravel (), Brice Magdalou and Patrick Moyes ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2019, vol. 52, issue 3, No 3, 453-475

Abstract: Abstract What would be the analogue of the Lorenz quasi-ordering when the variable of interest is continuous and of a purely ordinal nature? We argue that it is possible to derive such a criterion by substituting for the Pigou–Dalton transfer used in the standard inequality literature what we refer to as a Hammond progressive transfer. According to this criterion, one distribution of utilities is considered to be less unequal than another if it is judged better by both the lexicographic extensions of the maximin and the minimax, henceforth referred to as the leximin and the antileximax, respectively. If one imposes in addition that an increase in someone’s utility makes the society better off, then one is left with the leximin, while the requirement that society welfare increases as the result of a decrease of one person’s utility gives the antileximax criterion. Incidentally, the paper provides an alternative and simple characterisation of the leximin principle widely used in the social choice and welfare literature.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-018-1159-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Inequality measurement with an ordinal and continuous variable (2019)
Working Paper: Inequality Measurement with an Ordinal and Continuous Variable (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:52:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s00355-018-1159-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-018-1159-8

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().