This paper deals with the axiomatic derivation of social evaluation indices in a multidimensional context. The resulting evaluation formula is the geometric mean of the egalitarian equivalent values of the different characteristics under consideration. We provide an application to the...

This paper refers to some social evaluation problems when equity matters. We propose here a way of assessing the equality of opportunity that is applicable to categorical data. It consists of dividing society into groups with similar characteristics and to measure the dispersion of outcomes...

This paper refers to the ranking of densities that describe the distribution of an attribute in a given set of populations. The key elements of the problem are: (i) The distributions refer to ordered categorical data (e.g. health statuses, educational achievements, prestige positions,...

The Human Development Index has experienced substantial modifications in the 2010 edition of the Human Development Report (changes in some of the variables, a different aggregation procedure, and the introduction of distributive considerations, among others). Those changes respond to some...

This paper provides a criterion to evaluate the overall performance of a given number of groups whose members can be of different types, out of the analysis of their relative frequencies. Assuming that types can be ordered from best to worse, the starting point is that of dominance relations in...

This paper analyzes the evaluation of the relative performance of a set of groups when their outcomes are defined in terms of categorical data and the groups’ members are heterogeneous. This type of problem has been dealt with in Herrero and Villar (2013) for the case of a homogeneous...

We propose a new Human Development Index that involves a number of changes with respect to the present one, even though it keeps the basic structure of the index (namely, preserving “health”, “education” and “material wellbeing” as the three basic dimensions of human development)....

This paper reports the results of an experiment in which probabilistic insurance, as proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), is compared both with full insurance and no insurance. The experimental results conform to the intuitive prediction that risk-averse agents who are indifferent between...