Generalized distribution based diversity measurement

Survey and unification

Abstract

Social and natural sciences employ a number of different measures of diversity. The presents paper surveys those depending on the distribution of abundances among a given set of categories. Characteristic properties of the measures are generalized and a unifying notation is derived. It is argued that such unification enables scientists and decision makers to measure distribution based diversity in a new, more flexible manner, and represents a useful complement to models of generalized feature based diversity, such as Nehring and Puppe's (2002) theory of diversity.