Testing against second-order stochastic dominance of multiple distributions

Abstract

Second-order stochastic dominance plays an important role in reliability and various branches of economics such as finance and decision-making under risk, and statistical testing for the stochastic dominance is often useful in practice. In this paper, we present a test of stochastic equality under the constraint of second-order stochastic dominance based on the theory of empirical processes. The asymptotic distribution of the test statistic is obtained, and a simple method to compute the critical value is derived. Simulation results and real data examples are presented to illustrate the proposed test method.