Satya R. Chakravarty - Böcker

This book provides a synthesis of some recent issues and an up-to-date treatment of some of the major important issues in distributional analysis that I have covered in my previous book Ethical Social Index Numbers, which was widely accepted by students, teachers, researchers and practitioners in the area. Wide coverage of on-going and advanced topics and their analytical, articulate and authoritative p- sentation make the book theoretically and methodologically quite contemporary and inclusive, and highly responsive to the practical problems of recent concern. Since many countries of the world are still characterized by high levels of income inequality, Chap. 1 analyzes the problems of income inequality measurement in detail. Poverty alleviation is an overriding goal of development and social policy. To formulate antipoverty policies, research on poverty has mostly focused on inco- based indices. In view of this, a substantive analysis of income-based poverty has been presented in Chap. 2. The subject of Chap. 3 is people’s perception about income inequality in terms of deprivation. Since polarization is of current concern to analysts and social decisi- makers, a discussion on polarization is presented in Chap. 4.

“An Outline of Financial Economics” presents a systematic treatment of the theory and methodology of finance and economics. The book follows an analytical and geometric methodology, explaining technical terms and mathematical operations in clear, non-technical language, and providing intuitive explanations of the mathematical results. The text begins with a discussion of financial instruments, which form the basis of finance theory, and goes on to analyze bonds – which are regarded as fixed income securities – in a simple framework, and to discuss the valuation of stocks and cash flows in detail. Highly relevant topics such as attitudes toward risk, uncertainty, the financial structure of a firm, stochastic dominance, portfolio management, option pricing and conditions for non-arbitrage are analyzed explicitly. Because of its wide coverage and analytical, articulate and authoritative presentation, “An Outline of Financial Economics” will be an indispensable book for finance researchers and undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as economics, finance, econometrics, statistics and mathematics.

This book aims, primarily, to introduce concepts in welfare economics and public economics and will be useful for students in these courses. It provides unified approaches to the evaluation of equality, depolarization, and tax progressivity, three highly important aspects of social wellness. Interconnections among the three seemingly unrelated welfare characteristics are rigorously analyzed in the book, while addressing the questions: What notions of progressivity ensure that an after-tax or post-subsidy income distribution is regarded as more equal than its before-tax or pre-subsidy counterpart? How can depolarization be related to this enquiry? The book takes a sharp and in-depth look also at the questions of equal sacrifice in taxation, incidence of taxation on deprivation, policy implications of alternative taxation schemes, and alternative economic allocation rules. In order to aid students to the best possible extent, it provides non-technical explanations and is enriched by analytical and numerical examples and graphical illustrations of important concepts.

This book aims, primarily, to introduce concepts in welfare economics and public economics and will be useful for students in these courses. It provides unified approaches to the evaluation of equality, depolarization, and tax progressivity, three highly important aspects of social wellness. Interconnections among the three seemingly unrelated welfare characteristics are rigorously analyzed in the book, while addressing the questions: What notions of progressivity ensure that an after-tax or post-subsidy income distribution is regarded as more equal than its before-tax or pre-subsidy counterpart? How can depolarization be related to this enquiry? The book takes a sharp and in-depth look also at the questions of equal sacrifice in taxation, incidence of taxation on deprivation, policy implications of alternative taxation schemes, and alternative economic allocation rules. In order to aid students to the best possible extent, it provides non-technical explanations and is enriched by analytical and numerical examples and graphical illustrations of important concepts.

The distribution of wealth and income is never uniform, and philosophers and economists have tried for years to understand the reasons and formulate remedies for such inequalities. This book introduces the elegant and intriguing kinetic exchange models that physicists have developed to tackle these issues. This is the first monograph in econophysics focussed on the analyses and modelling of these distributions, and is ideal for physicists and economists. It is written in simple, lucid language, with plenty of illustrations and in-depth analyses, making it suitable for researchers new to this field as well as specialized readers. It explores the origin of economic inequality and examines the scientific steps that can be taken to reduce this inequality in the future.

Cooperative game theory deals with situations where objectives of participants of the game are partially cooperative and partially conflicting. It is in the interest of participants to cooperate in the sense of making binding agreements to achieve the maximum possible benefit. When it comes to distribution of benefit/payoffs, participants have conflicting interests. Such situations are usually modelled as cooperative games. While the book mainly discusses transferable utility games, there is also a brief analysis of non-transferable utility games. Alternative solution concepts to cooperative game theoretic problems are presented in chapters 1-9 and the next four chapters present issues related to computations of solutions discussed in the earlier chapters. The proofs of all results presented in the book are quite explicit. Additionally the mathematical techniques employed in demonstrating the results will be helpful to those who wish to learn application of mathematics for solving problems in game theory.

Cooperative game theory deals with situations where objectives of participants of the game are partially cooperative and partially conflicting. It is in the interest of participants to cooperate in the sense of making binding agreements to achieve the maximum possible benefit. When it comes to distribution of benefit/payoffs, participants have conflicting interests. Such situations are usually modelled as cooperative games. While the book mainly discusses transferable utility games, there is also a brief analysis of non-transferable utility games. Alternative solution concepts to cooperative game theoretic problems are presented in chapters 1-9 and the next four chapters present issues related to computations of solutions discussed in the earlier chapters. The proofs of all results presented in the book are quite explicit. Additionally the mathematical techniques employed in demonstrating the results will be helpful to those who wish to learn application of mathematics for solving problems in game theory.

This book analyzes the following four distinct, although not dissimilar, areas of social choice theory and welfare economics: nonstrategic choice, Harsanyi's aggregation theorems, distributional ethics and strategic choice. While for aggregation of individual ranking of social states, whether the persons behave strategically or non-strategically, the decision making takes place under complete certainty; in the Harsanyi framework uncertainty has a significant role in the decision making process. Another ingenious characteristic of the book is the discussion of ethical approaches to evaluation of inequality arising from unequal distributions of achievements in the different dimensions of human well-being. Given its wide coverage, combined with newly added materials, end-chapter problems and bibliographical notes, the book will be helpful material for students and researchers interested in this frontline area research. Its lucid exposition, along with non-technical and graphical illustration of the concepts, use of numerical examples, makes the book a useful text.

This book analyzes the following four distinct, although not dissimilar, areas of social choice theory and welfare economics: nonstrategic choice, Harsanyi's aggregation theorems, distributional ethics and strategic choice. While for aggregation of individual ranking of social states, whether the persons behave strategically or non-strategically, the decision making takes place under complete certainty; in the Harsanyi framework uncertainty has a significant role in the decision making process. Another ingenious characteristic of the book is the discussion of ethical approaches to evaluation of inequality arising from unequal distributions of achievements in the different dimensions of human well-being. Given its wide coverage, combined with newly added materials, end-chapter problems and bibliographical notes, the book will be helpful material for students and researchers interested in this frontline area research. Its lucid exposition, along with non-technical and graphical illustration of the concepts, use of numerical examples, makes the book a useful text.

“An indispensable reference for all researchers interested in the measurement of social  welfare. . .”—François Bourguignon, Emeritus Professor at Paris School of Economics, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank.  “. . .a detailed, insightful, and pedagogical presentation of the theoretical grounds of multidimensional well-being, inequality, and poverty measurement. Any student, researcher, and practitioner interested in the multidimensional approach should begin their journey into such a fascinating theme with this wonderful book.”—François Maniquet, Professor, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.A Review of the Multidimensional Approaches to the Measurement of Welfare, Inequality, and PovertyAnalyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach offers a comprehensive approach to the measurement of well-being that includes characteristics such as income, health, literacy, and housing. The author presents a systematic comparison of the alternative approaches to the measurement of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability. The text contains real-life applications of some multidimensional aggregations (most of which have been designed by international organizations such as the United NationsDevelopment Program and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) that help to judge the performance of a country in the various dimensions of well-being.The text offers an evaluation of how well a society is doing with respect to achievements of all the individuals in the dimensions considered and clearly investigates how achievements in the dimensions can be evaluated from different perspectives. The author includes a detailed scrutiny of alternative techniques for setting weights to individual dimensional metrics and offers an extensive analysis into both the descriptive and welfare theoretical approaches to the concerned multi-attribute measurement and related issues. This important resource:• Contains a synthesis of multidimensional welfare, inequality, poverty, and vulnerability analysis• Examines aggregations of achievement levels in the concerned dimensions of well-being from various standpoints• Shows how to measure poverty using panel data instead of restricting attention to a single period and when we have imprecise information on dimensional achievements• Argues that multidimensional analysis is intrinsically different from marginal distributions-based analysisWritten for students, teachers, researchers, and scholars, Analyzing Multidimensional Well-Being: A Quantitative Approach puts the focus on various approaches to the measurementof the many aspects of well-being and quality of life.Satya R. Chakravarty is a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He is an Editor of Social Choice and Welfare and a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Economic Inequality.

This book provides a synthesis of some recent issues and an up-to-date treatment of some of the major important issues in distributional analysis that I have covered in my previous book Ethical Social Index Numbers, which was widely accepted by students, teachers, researchers and practitioners in the area. Wide coverage of on-going and advanced topics and their analytical, articulate and authoritative p- sentation make the book theoretically and methodologically quite contemporary and inclusive, and highly responsive to the practical problems of recent concern. Since many countries of the world are still characterized by high levels of income inequality, Chap. 1 analyzes the problems of income inequality measurement in detail. Poverty alleviation is an overriding goal of development and social policy. To formulate antipoverty policies, research on poverty has mostly focused on inco- based indices. In view of this, a substantive analysis of income-based poverty has been presented in Chap. 2. The subject of Chap. 3 is people’s perception about income inequality in terms of deprivation. Since polarization is of current concern to analysts and social decisi- makers, a discussion on polarization is presented in Chap. 4.

“An Outline of Financial Economics” presents a systematic treatment of the theory and methodology of finance and economics. The book follows an analytical and geometric methodology, explaining technical terms and mathematical operations in clear, non-technical language, and providing intuitive explanations of the mathematical results. The text begins with a discussion of financial instruments, which form the basis of finance theory, and goes on to analyze bonds – which are regarded as fixed income securities – in a simple framework, and to discuss the valuation of stocks and cash flows in detail. Highly relevant topics such as attitudes toward risk, uncertainty, the financial structure of a firm, stochastic dominance, portfolio management, option pricing and conditions for non-arbitrage are analyzed explicitly. Because of its wide coverage and analytical, articulate and authoritative presentation, “An Outline of Financial Economics” will be an indispensable book for finance researchers and undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as economics, finance, econometrics, statistics and mathematics.

In this book we are concerned with income profile based ethical social index numbers. An ethical index is designed from an explicit social evaluation function with a specific purpose in mind. For example, an ethical relative inequality index determines the fraction of total income that could be saved without any welfare loss if society distri­ buted incomes equally. Ethical indices contrast with descriptive indices which are de­ rived without using any concept of social welfare. Needless to say, ethical indices are not meant to supplant descriptive indices, rather they are constructed with different aims. We begin Chapter 1 with a formal discussion on the concept of a social evaluation function. In the main body of this chapter we consider the problem of ranking income profiles using a social evaluation function. In Chapter 2 we set about analyzing alter­ native approaches to the measurement of inequality. In Chapter 3 we focus our attention on the Gini index, the most frequently used index of inequality, and its extensions. In Chapter 4 we formulate the notion of an ethical distance function that measures welfare of one population relative to another. Chapter 5 is devoted to quantifications and discussions of alternative definitions of relative deprivation put forward by Runci­ man(1966).

This monograph initially offers a systematic treatment of the theory and methodology of alternative notions of income polarization and related issues. It then goes on to analyze social polarization, ordinal polarization, and the relations between inequality polarization, fractionalization and likelihood of conflicts. Axiomatic approaches to the measurement of polarization from different perspectives are analyzed rigorously. In order to understand the difference between inequality and polarization, a discussion on income inequality is also included.

This monograph initially offers a systematic treatment of the theory and methodology of alternative notions of income polarization and related issues. It then goes on to analyze social polarization, ordinal polarization, and the relations between inequality polarization, fractionalization and likelihood of conflicts. Axiomatic approaches to the measurement of polarization from different perspectives are analyzed rigorously. In order to understand the difference between inequality and polarization, a discussion on income inequality is also included.

The combined efforts of the Physicists and the Economists in recent years in a- lyzing and modeling various dynamic phenomena in monetary and social systems have led to encouragingdevelopments,generally classi?ed under the title of Eco- physics. These developmentsshare a commonambitionwith the alreadyestablished ?eld of Quantitative Economics. This volume intends to offer the reader a glimpse of these two parallel initiatives by collecting review papers written by well-known experts in the respective research frontiers in one cover. This massive book presents a unique combination of research papers contributed almost equally by Physicists and Economists. Additional contributions from C- puter Scientists and Mathematicians are also included in this volume. It consists of two parts: The ?rst part concentrates on econophysics of games and social choices and is the proceedings of the Econophys-Kolkata IV workshop held at the Indian Statistical Institute and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, both in Kolkata, d- ing March 9-13, 2009.The second part consists of contributionsto quantitative e- nomics by experts in connection with the Platinum Jubilee celebration of the Indian Statistical Institute. In this connectiona Forewordfor the volume, written by Sankar K. Pal, Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, is put forth. Both parts specialize mostly on frontier problems in games and social choices. The?rst partofthebookdealswith severalrecentdevelopmentsineconophysics. Game theory is integral to the formulation of modern economic analysis. Often games display a situation where the social optimal could not be reached as a - sult of non co-operation between different agents.