The Measurement of Diversity
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.
diversity distance measures