{"title":"Relative measures of economic insecurity","authors":"Walter Bossert, Conchita D’Ambrosio","doi":"10.1007/s00355-024-01507-4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>We characterize a new class of individual measures of economic insecurity in a setting where there is a single relevant variable that can be interpreted as income or consumption. Insecurity is intended to capture the difficulties faced by an economic agent when confronted with adverse events. We work with an intertemporal model and base our measures on the changes in the variable when moving from one period to the next. Our approach is axiomatic and differs from the existing literature in two respects. First, we adopt a relative (scale-invariant) concept of insecurity and, second, we restrict attention to a relatively small set of requirements that we consider plausible and intuitively appealing. As a result, we identify a large class of measures that can be thought of as providing a tool box to empirical researchers who can select those members of our class that they consider suitable for the application in question. In addition, we present a dominance criterion based on our new insecurity measures.</p>","PeriodicalId":47663,"journal":{"name":"Social Choice and Welfare","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Choice and Welfare","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-024-01507-4","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
We characterize a new class of individual measures of economic insecurity in a setting where there is a single relevant variable that can be interpreted as income or consumption. Insecurity is intended to capture the difficulties faced by an economic agent when confronted with adverse events. We work with an intertemporal model and base our measures on the changes in the variable when moving from one period to the next. Our approach is axiomatic and differs from the existing literature in two respects. First, we adopt a relative (scale-invariant) concept of insecurity and, second, we restrict attention to a relatively small set of requirements that we consider plausible and intuitively appealing. As a result, we identify a large class of measures that can be thought of as providing a tool box to empirical researchers who can select those members of our class that they consider suitable for the application in question. In addition, we present a dominance criterion based on our new insecurity measures.
期刊介绍:
Social Choice and Welfare explores all aspects, both normative and positive, of welfare economics, collective choice, and strategic interaction. Topics include but are not limited to: preference aggregation, welfare criteria, fairness, justice and equity, rights, inequality and poverty measurement, voting and elections, political games, coalition formation, public goods, mechanism design, networks, matching, optimal taxation, cost-benefit analysis, computational social choice, judgement aggregation, market design, behavioral welfare economics, subjective well-being studies and experimental investigations related to social choice and voting. As such, the journal is inter-disciplinary and cuts across the boundaries of economics, political science, philosophy, and mathematics. Articles on choice and order theory that include results that can be applied to the above topics are also included in the journal. While it emphasizes theory, the journal also publishes empirical work in the subject area reflecting cross-fertilizing between theoretical and empirical research. Readers will find original research articles, surveys, and book reviews.Officially cited as: Soc Choice Welf