While experimental and behavioral economics have extensively studied the role of both upward and downward comparisons of economic status, the latter have been largely neglected in secondary data studies. The scarce existing evidence shows mixed results and is essentially limited to analyses 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...

Some analysts use sequential dominance criteria , and others use equivalence scales in combination with non-sequential dominance tests, to make welfare comparisons of joint distributions of income and needs. In this paper we present a new sequential procedure which copes with situations in which...