Generalized transportation cost spaces

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the geometry of transportation cost spaces and their generalizations introduced by Melleray, Petrov, and Vershik (2008). Transportation cost spaces are also known as Arens-Eells, Lipschitz-free, or Wasserstein $1$ spaces. In this work, the existence of metric spaces with the following properties is proved: (1) uniformly discrete infinite metric spaces transportation cost spaces on which do not contain isometric copies of $\ell_1$, this result answers a question raised by Cuth and Johanis (2017); (2) locally finite metric spaces which admit isometric embeddings only into Banach spaces containing isometric copies of $\ell_1$; (3) metric spaces for which the double-point norm is not a norm. In addition, it is proved that the double-point norm spaces corresponding to trees are close to $\ell_\infty^d$ of the corresponding dimension, and that for all finite metric spaces $M$, except a very special class, the infimum of all seminorms for which the embedding of $M$ into the corresponding seminormed space is isometric, is not a seminorm.