TY - JOUR
T1 - Composite Index Ranking of Economic Well-Being in U.S. Metropolitan Areas
T2 - How Prevalent are Rank Anomalies?
AU - Ehrlich, Justin
AU - Medcalfe, Simon
AU - Sanders, Shane
N1 - Funding Information:
The presented study shows the results of the project ‘ Effects of Climate Changes on Wind Behaviour and Water Levels at the German North Sea Coast ’, funded by the BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung). The main objective of the project was to develop and to apply methods for predicting the effects of climate changes on the wind behaviour and the water levels in the German Bight. The meteorological aspect of the project was handled by the Institute of Meteorology and Climatology, University of Hannover. Typical features of meteorological parameter fields had to be identified in order to find storm surge conditions from global climatological simulations of double and triple CO2-scenarios of the ECHAM3 model (DKRZ, 1994). The hydrodynamical part of the project was performed by the Institute of Fluid Mechanics and Computer Applications in Civil Engineering, University of Hannover. The wind and pressure fields from the meteorological part of the project were used as an input for three hydrodynamical models in order to study the influence of changed climatological conditions. 2001 Academic Press
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - Composite indicators have the advantage of summarizing complex multi-dimensional concepts in a single measurement. They also suffer from disadvantages such as subjectivity in choice of indicators, weighting, and aggregation methods. In this paper, we update Medcalfe’s (Social Indicators Research 139(3), 1147–1167. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1755-5. 2018) Economic Well-Being (EWB) index of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas with the latest (2017) available data. Using this index of EWB, we investigate two social choice violations that have been understudied in the composite indicators literature. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence of cycles and violations of independence of irrelevant alternatives. Depending on the number of cities and ranking components, incidence of these social choice violations can be large, creating ambiguity in a set of rankings. In general, having more ranking components reduces the expected and, for the most part, realized, incidence of social choice violations. Further, the results suggest that the EWB index rankings should potentially be interpreted in terms of rank tiers rather than in terms of individual rankings.
AB - Composite indicators have the advantage of summarizing complex multi-dimensional concepts in a single measurement. They also suffer from disadvantages such as subjectivity in choice of indicators, weighting, and aggregation methods. In this paper, we update Medcalfe’s (Social Indicators Research 139(3), 1147–1167. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1755-5. 2018) Economic Well-Being (EWB) index of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas with the latest (2017) available data. Using this index of EWB, we investigate two social choice violations that have been understudied in the composite indicators literature. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence of cycles and violations of independence of irrelevant alternatives. Depending on the number of cities and ranking components, incidence of these social choice violations can be large, creating ambiguity in a set of rankings. In general, having more ranking components reduces the expected and, for the most part, realized, incidence of social choice violations. Further, the results suggest that the EWB index rankings should potentially be interpreted in terms of rank tiers rather than in terms of individual rankings.
KW - Community quality of life
KW - Composite index
KW - Economic well-being
KW - Quality of life
KW - Social choice violations
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103605350&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85103605350&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11205-021-02673-z
DO - 10.1007/s11205-021-02673-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85103605350
SN - 0303-8300
VL - 157
SP - 543
EP - 562
JO - Social Indicators Research
JF - Social Indicators Research
IS - 2
ER -