Inequality measures perform differently in global and local assessments: An exploratory computational experiment

Inequality measures are widely used in both the academia and public media to help us understand how incomes and wealth are distributed. They can be used to assess the distribution of a whole society - global inequality - as well as inequality of actors' referent networks local inequality. How different is local inequality from global inequality? Formalizing the structure of reference groups as a network, the paper conducted a computational experiment to see how the structure of complex networks influences the difference between global and local inequality assessed by a selection of inequality measures. It was found that local inequality tends to be higher than global inequality when population size is large; network is dense and heterophilously assorted, and income distribution is less dispersed. The implications of the simulation findings are discussed. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.