The value of is often referred to as the order of the diversity. It defines the sensitivity of the diversity value to rare vs. abundant species by modifying how the weighted mean of the species proportional abundances is calculated. With some values of the parameter , the value of assumes familiar kinds of weighted mean as special cases. In particular, corresponds to the weighted harmonic mean, to the weighted geometric mean and to the weighted arithmetic mean. As approaches infinity, the weighted generalized mean with exponent approaches the maximum value, which is the proportional abundance of the most abundant species in the dataset. Generally, increasing the value of increases the effective weight given to the most abundant species. This leads to obtaining a larger value and a smaller true diversity () value with increasing .