Diversity quantification : how to overcome limitations of usual indices ?

The talk provides a survey of the methods developped by economists to compare alternative set of objects (ecosystems for instance) on the basis of their diversity. A salient feature of the approach developed by economists to the problem is to be based on an a priori notion of dissimilarity between objects and to define the diversity of an eco-system as the agregate dissimilarity of the objects it contains. Many approaches in economics, and especially that of Weitzman, assume that the underlying notion of dissimilarity is sufficiently precise to be defined by a cardinally meaningful distance function. The approach of Weitzman is then contrasted with the one developed by Pattanaik and Xu, as well as by a paper co-authored by myself and S. Bervoets, which is based on a less demanding notion of dissimilarity that is only required to be ordinally meaningful.

Speaker

Nicolas Gravel, economist, CSH

Organisers

Department of Ecology French Institute of Pondicherry

Venue

Jawaharlal Nehru Conference Hall
French Institute of Pondicherry
11, Saint Louis Street
Pondicherry - 605 001