Abstract
This chapter considers in detail the issue of ambiguity associated with a collection of indicators. By considering the circumstances under which an ordering would be unambiguous, it develops measures of the extent to which a collection of indicators could be ambiguous in a given situation. A methodology for dividing a collection of distributions into sets of “unambiguous subgroups” is also proposed. This chapter ends with an empirical example of ambiguity in ordering the income distributions of nations in the Eurozone.
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Notes
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It is interesting to note that the Gini coefficient is subgroup decomposable under perfect segmentation of subgroups Mookherjee and Shorrocks (1982).
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Anderson, G. (2019). Ambiguity, Comparability, Segmentation and All That. In: Multilateral Wellbeing Comparison in a Many Dimensioned World. Global Perspectives on Wealth and Distribution. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21130-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21130-1_6
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