On the congruence $x^x\equiv \lambda \pmod p$

Abstract

In the present paper we obtain several new results related to the problem of upper bound estimates for the number of solutions of the congruence $$ x^{x}\equiv \lambda\pmod p;\quad x\in \mathbb{N},\quad x\le p-1, $$ where $p$ is a large prime number, $\lambda$ is an integer corpime to $p$. Our arguments are based on recent estimates of trigonometric sums over subgroups due to Shkredov and Shteinikov.