Estimation of Deprivation Level Functions using a Numerical Rating Scale
Xihui Wang, Xiang Wang, Liang Liang, Xiaohang Yue, Luk N. Van Wassenhove
Production and Operations Management · 2017 · Volume 26 · Issue 11
Abstract
Evaluating and quantifying human suffering in humanitarian operations offers an innovative and potentially powerful way to assess the performance of humanitarian logistics (HL) and help build optimization models. Previous studies have suggesteddeprivation costas a metric and have estimated deprivation cost functions for water using willingness-to-pay. Our study proposesdeprivation levels, defined as the degree of human suffering caused by lack of access to a good or service, and estimates deprivation level functions using a numerical rating scale. Analyzing data collected from respondents with and without disaster experience, we find that individuals in the latter category estimate deprivation differently from the beneficiaries of disaster relief. Our study demonstrates that deprivation levels can be expressed as logistic growth functions with a typical S-shape, and that these can be integrated into HL optimization models to better account for human suffering.
Keywords
humanitarian logistics, human suffering, deprivation level, numerical rating scale
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