Tame and wild refinement monoids

Abstract

The class of refinement monoids (abelian monoids satisfying the Riesz refinement property) is subdivided into those which are tame, defined as being an inductive limit of finitely generated refinement monoids, and those which are wild, i.e., not tame. It is shown that tame refinement monoids enjoy many positive properties, including separative cancellation ($2x=2y=x+y \implies x=y$) and multiplicative cancellation with respect to the algebraic ordering ($mx\le my \implies x\le y$). In contrast, examples are constructed to exhibit refinement monoids which enjoy all the mentioned good properties but are nonetheless wild.