Some remarks on the weak maximizing property

TL;DR

This paper investigates the weak maximizing property (WMP) in Banach spaces, providing conditions for its failure, characterizing spaces with WMP, and exploring its behavior under various space operations and specific examples.

Contribution

It offers new criteria for when Banach space pairs fail or have the WMP, including explicit results for classical spaces and a complete characterization for certain direct sums.

Findings

Pairs $(L_p[0,1], L_q[0,1])$ fail WMP when $p>2$ or $q<2$

If $(E, F)$ has WMP for all $F$, then $E$ is finite dimensional

$(E, F)$ has WMP for all reflexive $E$ iff $F$ has the Schur property

Abstract

A pair of Banach spaces $(E, F)$ is said to have the weak maximizing property (WMP, for short) if for every bounded linear operator $T$ from $E$ into $F$, the existence of a non-weakly null maximizing sequence for $T$ implies that $T$ attains its norm. This property was recently introduced in an article by R. Aron, D. Garc\'ia, D. Pelegrino and E. Teixeira, raising several open questions. The aim of the present paper is to contribute to the better knowledge of the WMP and its limitations. Namely, we provide sufficient conditions for a pair of Banach spaces to fail the WMP and study the behaviour of this property with respect to quotients, subspaces, and direct sums, which open the gate to present several consequences. For instance, we deal with pairs of the form $(L_p[0,1], L_q[0,1])$, proving that these pairs fail the WMP whenever $p>2$ or $q<2$. We also show that, under certain conditions on $E$, the assumption that $(E, F)$ has the WMP for every Banach space $F$ implies that $E$ must be finite dimensional. On the other hand, we show that $(E, F)$ has the WMP for every reflexive space $E$ if and only if $F$ has the Schur property. We also give a complete characterization for the pairs $(\ell_s \oplus_p \ell_p, \ell_s \oplus_q \ell_q)$ to have the WMP by calculating the moduli of asymptotic uniform convexity of $\ell_s \oplus_p \ell_p$ and of asymptotic uniform smoothness of $\ell_s \oplus_q \ell_q$ when $1 < p \leq s \leq q < \infty$. We conclude the paper by discussing some variants of the WMP and presenting a list of open problems on the topic of the paper.