On the evaluation of Group Performance with Categorical Data

Economics

Further details

This paper provides a criterion to evaluate the overall performance of a given number of groups whose members belong to different categories, out of the analysis of their relative frequencies. Assuming that categories can be ordered from best to worse, the starting point is that of dominance relations in pair-wise comparisons. We say that group i dominates group j when the expected category of a member of i is higher than the expected category of a member of j. We extend this principle to multi-group comparisons in an endogeneous way. The evaluation function associates, to each evaluation problem, the (unique) dominant eigenvector of a matrix whose entries describe the dominance relations between groups in pairwise comparisons. An application to the structure of human capital in Europe illustrates the working of this model.