This paper characterizes an index that is informationally richer than the commonly used ethno‐linguistic fractionalization (ELF) index. Our measure of fractionalization takes as a primitive the individuals, as opposed to ethnic groups, and uses information on the similarities among them....

Social exclusion manifests itself in the persistent relative lack of an individual's access to functionings compared with other members of society, and we model it as being in a state of deprivation over time. We view deprivation as having two basic determinants: the lack of identification with...

We introduce and axiomatize a one-parameter class of individual deprivation measures. Motivated by a suggestion of Runciman, we modify Yitzhaki’s index by multiplying it by a function that is interpreted as measuring the part of deprivation generated by an agent’s observation that others in...

We introduce a one-parameter class of individual deprivation measures. Motivated by a suggestion of Runciman, we modify Yitzhaki’s index by multiplying it by a function that is interpreted as measuring the part of deprivation generated by an agent’s observation that others in his reference...