Social evaluation of deprivation count distributions

This paper is concerned with the measurement of the extent of deprivation when the available information is given by a set of dichotomous variables, and the data are summarised by the count distribution, i.e. the distribution of the number of dimensions in which an individual suffers from deprivation. Next, by drawing on the expected utility framework that originates from Atkinson (1970) the individual deprivation counts are aggregated into summary measures of deprivation, which prove to admit a convenient decomposition into the mean and the dispersion of the distribution of multiple deprivations.