Ratio methods to the mean estimation with known quantiles

We address the problem of estimating the finite population mean in survey sampling, by exploiting any available auxiliary information in order to increase the precision of classical estimators. The idea is to use any population quantiles of the available auxiliary variables which are known in many real situation from census, administrative files, etc. This is achieved using these known quantities in the construction of the estimators, by modifying the usual ratio estimation methods and afterwards defining a general class of exponentiation ratio estimators. The advantages of the proposed estimators are demonstrated using theoretical asymptotic tools and through a simulation study. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.