Human Development &
Capability Association

There has recently been increasing agreement on the use of a multidimensional ap- proach to deprivation. The implementation of such an approach poses a number of conceptual and empirical questions; the choice of weights is among the most crucial. This paper builds on this literature by characterizing a deprivation index that weighs dierent dimensions according to their perceived importance by members of alterna- tive reference groups. This method is applied to European data. In the empirical section, we demonstrate that preferences over dimensions are dierentiated by social group, and taking this into consideration consistently increases on average the absolute value of the index, but not to the same extent among dierent group specications.

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