A new statistic for testing uniformity of ranking data

In this paper, as an alternative to both the average Kendall tau and average Spearman's rho, we propose a new statistic, tau*, to test the null hypothesis of complete randomness amongst the n judges each rank r objects independently. We define tau* based on Rao's ideas of the diversity coefficient of a population. Monte Carlo experiments we made show that the test based on the proposed statistic has better and desirable power properties relative to competing tests.