| Abstract: | General considerations about means and expectations are preceded by a short historical overview. The existing approaches to the definition of means are classified into three groups: approximational, functional, and axiomatic. In some particular cases all of them are equivalent. The problem of meaningfulness of means is discussed for ordinal data and for some important cases of metric data. A survey of the main areas of applications: decision theory, group decision, insurance, economical equity and inequality is also provided. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
