Frank A Cowell and Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser

Published January 1996

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The economic analysis of income distribution and related topics makes extensive use of dominance criteria to draw inferences about welfare comparisons. However it is possible that - just as some inequality statistics can be very sensitive to extreme values - conclusions drawn from empirical implementations of dominance criteria may also be influenced by data contamination. We show the conditions under which this may occur and propose empirical methods to work round the problem.