The Measurement of Diversity

Walter Bossert, Prasanta K. Pattanaik and Yongsheng Xu

Cahiers de recherche from Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques

Abstract: The notion of diversity is an issue that is of relevance in several contexts. For example, the biodiversity of a given ecological environment and the diversity of the options available to a decision maker have attracted some attention in recent research. This paper provides an axiomatic approach to the measurement of diversity. We characterize two nested classes of ordinal measures of diversity and an important member of these classes. We prove that the latter special case is equivalent to a diversity ordering proposed by Weitzman.

Keywords: diversity; distance measures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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http://hdl.handle.net/1866/357 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Measurement of Diversity (2001)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtl:montde:2001-17

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