Skaperdas (1996) characterized the contest success function (CSF), which stipulates the winning probabilities of the contestants, using respectively the scale invariance and translation invariance axioms. This paper first characterizes the entire family of CSFs that fulfils a convex mixture of...

An ethnic polarization index is a summary statistic of ethnic diversity in a population. Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005,2008) suggested an index of ethnic polarization, the RQ index, and discussed its properties in detail. In this paper we develop some axiomatic characterizations of the RQ...

An abbreviated or reduced-form monotonic polarization index is an increasing function of the between-group term and a decreasing function of the within-group term of a population subgroup decomposable inequality index. The between-group term represents the „identification? component of...

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g. the mean or the median), the amalgam...

This paper identifies a family of absolute consistent inequality indices using a weakly decomposable postulate suggested by Ebert (2010). Since one member employs an Atkinson (1970) type aggregation we refer to it as the Atkinson index of consistent inequality. A second member of this family...

This paper proposes a four-parameter statistical model of the personalized distribution of income using the "income share elasticity" approach suggested by Esteban (1986). Our proposed model includes the Singh-Maddala (1976) and Dagum (1977) distributions as special cases. The generalized beta...