Expectations of some ratio-type estimators under the gamma distribution

Abstract

We study the expectations of some ratio-type estimators under the gamma distribution. Expectations of ratio-type estimators are often difficult to compute due to the nature that they are constructed by combining two separate estimators. With the aid of Lukacs' Theorem and the gamma-beta (gamma-Dirichlet) relationship, we provide alternative proofs for the expected values of some common ratio-type estimators, including the sample Gini index, the sample Theil index, and the sample Atkinson index, under the gamma distribution. Our proofs using the distributional properties of the gamma distribution are much simpler than the existing ones. In addition, we also derive the expected value of the sample variance-to-mean ratio under the gamma distribution.