Governments, multinational companies, and researchers today collect unprecedented amounts of data on human feelings. These data provide information on citizens' happiness, levels of customer satisfaction, employees' satisfaction, mental stress, societal trust, and other important variables. Yet...

Governments, multinational companies, and researchers today collect unprecedented amounts of data on human feelings. These data provide information on citizens' happiness, levels of customer satisfaction, employees' satisfaction, mental stress, societal trust, and other important variables. Yet...

We quantify the information loss incurred by categorizing an unobserved continuous variable () into an ordered categorical scale (). The continuous variable is conceptualized as true score (Ï„) (which varies across individuals) plus random error ((epsilon)), with both components assumed to be...