When measuring a society's deprivation in a multi-attribute framework, researchers often resort to what we call a 'column-first two-stage procedure'. Under such procedures one first determines the society's deprivation for each attribute separately by aggregating the individuals' deprivation...

We provide characterizations of four new rules for individual decision-making under complete uncertainty. They are what we call the min-max rule, the max-min rule, the lexicographic min-max rule and the lexicographic max-min rule. These rules provide orderings of the sets of possible outcomes...

In decision-making involving multiple criteria or attributes, a decision maker first identifies all relevant evaluative attributes in making decisions. Then, a dominance principle is often invoked whenever applicable: whenever an option <italic>x</italic> is better than an option <italic>y</italic> in terms of some attribute and...

This paper analyzes the measurement of the diversity of sets based on the dissimilarity of the objects contained in the set. We discuss axiomatic approaches to diversity measurement and examine the considerations underlying the application of specific measures. Our focus is on descriptive...

The notion of diversity is an issue that is of relevance in several contexts. For example, the biodiversity of a given ecological environment and the diversity of the options available to a decision maker have attracted some attention in recent research. This paper provides an axiomatic approach...

This paper considers the functioning approach to the standard of living. It shows that, in evaluating standards of living, one is faced with deep-rooted tensions between the principle of weak dominance and the principle of minimal relativism, which requires some minimal respect for differences...