Choosing Aggregation Rules for Composite Indicators

Giuseppe Munda

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2012, vol. 109, issue 3, 337-354

Abstract: From a formal point of view, a composite indicator is an aggregate of all dimensions, objectives, individual indicators and variables used for its construction. This implies that what defines a composite indicator is the set of properties underlying its mathematical aggregation convention. In this article, I try to revise the theoretical debate on aggregation rules by looking at contributions from both voting theory and multi-criteria decision analysis. This cross-fertilization helps in clarifying many ambiguous issues still present in the literature and allows discussing the key assumptions that may change the evaluation of an aggregation rule easily, when a composite indicator has to be constructed. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Keywords: Voting paradoxes; Multi-criteria decision analysis; Rational choice; C43; C82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11205-011-9911-9

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