Ranking distributions of an ordinal variable

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

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We establish an equivalence between three criteria for comparing dis- tributions of an ordinal variable taking finitely many values. The first criterion is the possibility of going from one distribution to the other by a finite sequence of increments and/or Hammond transfers. The latter transfers are like the Pigou-Dalton ones, but without the requirement that the amount transferred be fixed. The second criterion is the unanimity of all comparisons of the distributions performed by a class of additively separable social evaluation functions. The third criterion is a new statis- tical test based on a weighted recursion of the cumulative distribution. We also identify an exact test for the possibility of going from one dis- tribution to another by a finite sequence of Hammond transfers only. An illustration of the usefulness of our approach for evaluating distributions of self-reported happiness level is also provided

Keywords: distributions; dominance; transfers; ordinal; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.umontpellier.fr/hal-02383191v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published in Economic Theory, 2021, 71 (1), pp.33-80. ⟨10.1007/s00199-019-01241-4⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.umontpellier.fr/hal-02383191v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ranking distributions of an ordinal variable (2021)
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:hal:journl:hal-02383191

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-019-01241-4

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().