Related papers: Social inequality: from data to statistical physic…
On one hand, a large class of inequality measures, which includes the generalized entropy, the Atkinson, the Gini, etc., for example, has been introduced in Mergane and Lo (2013). On the other hand, the influence function of statistics is…
Originally developed for measuring the heterogeneity of wealth measures, inequality indices are quantitative scores that take values in the unit interval, with the zero score characterizing perfect equality. In this paper, we draw attention…
The Gini index is a function that attempts to measure the amount of inequality in the distribution of a finite resource throughout a population. It is commonly used in economics as a measure of inequality of income or wealth. We define a…
This article focuses on some properties of three tools used to measure economic inequalities with respect to a distribution of wealth $\mu$: Gini coefficient $G$, Hoover coefficient or Robin Hood coefficient $H$, and the Lorenz…
We find the set of extremal points of Lorenz curves with fixed Gini index and compute the maximal $L^1$-distance between Lorenz curves with given values of their Gini coefficients. As an application we introduce a bidimensional index that…
Inequality measures provide a valuable tool for the analysis, comparison, and optimization based on system models. This work studies the relation between attributes or features of an individual to understand how redundant, unique, and…
Concern about income inequality has become prominent in public discourse around the world. However, studies in behavioral economics and psychology have consistently shown that people prefer not equal but fair income distributions. Thus,…
Ratios of quantiles are often computed for income distributions as rough measures of inequality, and inference for such ratios have recently become available. The special case when the quantiles are symmetrically chosen; that is, when the…
Identifying the causes of a model's unfairness is an important yet relatively unexplored task. We look into this problem through the lens of training data - the major source of unfairness. We ask the following questions: How would the…
In 1938, Gini studied a mean having two parameters. Later, many authors studied properties of this mean. In particular, it contains the famous means as harmonic, geometric, arithmetic, etc. Here we considered a sequence of inequalities…
Income and wealth allocation are foundational components of how economies operate. These are complex distributions, and it is hard to get a real sense for their dynamics using simplifications like average or median. One metric that…
We discuss several multi-agent models that have their origin in the kinetic exchange theory of statistical mechanics and have been recently applied to a variety of problems in the social sciences. This class of models can be easily adapted…
I discuss economic and social sources of inequality and elaborate on the role of social networks in inequality, economic immobility, and economic inefficiencies. The lens of social networks clarifies how the entanglement of people's…
We propose an extension of the univariate Lorenz curve and of the Gini coefficient to the multivariate case, i.e., to simultaneously measure inequality in more than one variable. Our extensions are based on copulas and measure inequality…
This paper pays tribute to Professor Giovanni Andrea Cornia's lifelong contributions to the measurement of global inequality. We review twelve world and regional databases of the Gini coefficient, illustrate their coverage, overlapping, and…
Measuring bias is key for better understanding and addressing unfairness in NLP/ML models. This is often done via fairness metrics which quantify the differences in a model's behaviour across a range of demographic groups. In this work, we…
We describe society as a nonequilibrium probabilistic system: N individuals occupy W resource states in it and produce entropy S over definite time periods. Resulting thermodynamics is however unusual because a second entropy, H, measures a…
Growing economic inequalities are observed in several countries throughout the world. Following Pareto, the power-law structure of these inequalities has been the subject of much theoretical and empirical work. But their nonequilibrium…
Social inequalities are ubiquitous and evolve towards a universal limit. Herein, we extensively review the values of inequality measures, namely the Gini ($g$) index and the Kolkata ($k$) index, two standard measures of inequality used in…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…