Inner γ-Convex Functions in Normed Linear Spaces

Abstract

A real-valued function f defined on a convex subset D of some normed linear space X is said to be inner γ-convex w.r.t. some fixed roughness degree γ > 0 if there is a ν ∈ [0, 1] such that

$\sup \limits _{\lambda \in [2, 1+1/\nu ]} \left (f((1-\lambda )x_{0}+\lambda x_{1})- (1-\lambda )f(x_{0})- \lambda f(x_{1})\right )\geq 0 $

holds for all x ₀, x ₁ ∈ D satisfying ∥x ₀ − x ₁∥ = ν γ and −(1/ν)x ₀ + (1 + 1/ν)x ₁ ∈ D. The requirement of this kind of roughly generalized convex functions is very weak; nevertheless, they also possess properties similar to those of convex functions relative to their supremum. For instance, if an inner γ-convex function defined on some bounded convex subset D of an inner product space attains its maximum, then it has maximizers at some strictly γ-extreme points of D. In this paper, some sufficient conditions and examples for γ-convex functions and several properties relative to the location of their maximizers are given.