Multidistances and inequality measures on abstract sets: An axiomatic approach

Starting from the notion of a multidistance, we formalize, through a suitable system of axioms, the concept of an inequality measure defined on a nonempty set with no additional structure implemented a priori. Among inequality measures, apart from multidistances we pay special attention to dispersions, and study their main features. Classical concepts will be generalized to this abstract setting. Multidistances are then revisited, and some new methods to generate them are implemented. A wide spectrum of interdisciplinary applications is outlined in the final section. This work is partially supported by the research projects ECO2015-65031-R , MTM2015-63608-P , TIN2016-77356-P , TIN2017-87600-P (MINECO/AEI-FEDER, UE) and PID2019-108392GB-I00 (AEI/10.13039/501100011033)