The price and quantity indices proposed in this paper exactly and unconditionally pass the product test, E = PQ. Because the indices are measured over single sets of products they can be used for the comparison of sets that do not contain the same types of products. Changes in product variety do not lead to biases in these indices. For homothetic functions, the indices can be used to decompose changes in productivity and the cost of living. Shannon’s (1948) entropy is shown to have properties that make it suitable as an index of product variety. This index of product variety is strongly related to the presented price and quantity indices.
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Paper provided by Maastricht : MERIT, Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology in its series Research Memoranda with number
028.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Klaus Nehring & Clemens Puppe, 2002.
"A Theory of Diversity,"
Econometrica,
Econometric Society, vol. 70(3), pages 1155-1198, May.
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