Consider the following nine rules for adjudicating conflicting claims: the proportional, constrained equal awards, constrained equal losses, Talmud, Piniles’, constrained egalitarian, adjusted proportional, random arrival, and minimal overlap rules. For each pair of rules in this list, we...

An income distribution is a mixture of two given income distributions if the relative frequency it associates with each income level is a convex combination of the relative frequencies associated with it by the given two income distributions——e.g., the income distribution of a country is...

We propose a straightforward dominance procedure for comparing social welfare orderings (SWOs) with respect to the degree of inequality aversion they express. We consider three versions of the procedure: (i) a criterion based on the Lorenz quasi-ordering which we argue to be the ideal version,...

We discuss a property of quasi-concavity for inequality measures. Defining income distributions as relative frequency functions, this property says that a convex combination of any two given income distributions is weakly more unequal than the least unequal income distribution of the two. The...

Hammond (J Econ Theory 11, 465–467, 1975), Meyer (J Econ Theory 11, 119–132, 1975), and Lambert (The distribution and redistribution of income, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001) provide the formal result connecting leximin and the idea of extreme inequality aversion for social...

We compare absolute, relative and intermediate views on the evolution of global inequality between 1980 and 2009. According to the relative view, inequality remains invariant after a uniform proportional change of all incomes whereas the absolute view requires invariance to a uniform change of...

The ethical view of prioritarianism holds the following: if an extra bundle of attributes is to be allocated to either of two individuals, then priority should be given to the worse off among the two. We consider multidimensional poverty comparisons with cardinal and ordinal attributes and...

We propose a criterion to rank poverty measures on the basis of distribution-sensitivity. The criterion compares reactions to ‘lossy’ transfers among the poor. We focus on the class of rank-dependent poverty measures and provide distribution-sensitivity rankings of the poverty gap ratio, the...

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...