We propose a new class of multidimensional poverty indices. Aggregation of the different dimensions relies on individual preferences. The Pareto principle is, therefore, satisfied among the poor. The indices add up individual measures of poverty that are computed as a convex transform of the...

Individual well-being depends not only on income but also on other dimensions of life, such as health, the quality of social relations and of the environment, employment, and job satisfaction. In this paper we survey the economic literature on how to construct such overall measures of...

We argue that normative indices of multidimensional inequality do not only measure a distribution’s extent of inequity (i.e., the gaps between the better-off and the worse-off), but also its extent of inefficiency (i.e., the non-realized mutually beneficial exchanges of goods). We provide a...

In this paper I investigate the problem of defining a multivariate dependence ordering. First, I provide a characterization of the concordance dependence ordering between multivariate random vectors with fixed margins. Central to the characterization is a multivariate generalization of a...

In this paper we examine whether, and how, welfare economics should incorporate the insights from happiness and satisfaction studies. Our main point is that measuring well-being by reported satisfaction levels can come in conáict with individuals judgments about their own lives and that these...

We discuss and compare five measures of individual well-being, namely income, an objective composite well-being index, a measure of subjective well-being, equivalent income, and a well-being measure based on the von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities of the individuals. After examining the...

We study direct democracy with population uncertainty. Voters’ participation is often among the desiderata by the election designer. We show that with a participation quorum, i.e. a threshold on the fraction of participating voters below which the status quo is kept, the status quo may be kept...

The adoption of gender quotas inpart y lists has beena voluntary decision by many parties in many countries, and is now a subject of discussioninman y others. The Parity Low passed inF rance in 2001 is particularly interesting because for the first time the quota was set at 50 percent, and the...

In a model where agents have unequal production skills and different preferences, we build social welfare functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information on individual preferences. Social welfare functions are required to satisfy properties of compensation for inequalities in...