A group action approach to the Daugavet property

Abstract

We introduce the $G$-Daugavet property ($G$-DPr, for short) for Banach spaces endowed with an action of a group $G$ by surjective linear isometries. This notion provides a common framework for the classical Daugavet property and the alternative Daugavet property, which correspond respectively to the trivial action and to the scalar action of $S_{\mathbb{K}}$. We establish several characterizations of the $G$-DPr in terms of $G$-slices and closed convex $G$-invariant hulls, recovering the usual slice descriptions of the DPr and the aDPr as particular cases. We show that the presence of a group action leads to new behavior in Daugavet theory. In particular, the $G$-DPr may hold on classical reflexive spaces in sharp contrast with the classical Daugavet property. We relate this phenomenon to convex transitivity, almost transitivity and finite-dimensional rotation problems. We also prove group-action versions of the classical characterizations for $L^1(μ, X)$- and $C(K,X)$-spaces. The paper also studies group separable determination, $G$-versions of numerical radius and numerical index, and connections between the $G$-DPr and strong Radon-Nikodým and SCD operators. Finally, we introduce a parameter which measures how far the $G$-DPr is from the classical DPr in a quantitative manner. As a consequence of these results, we obtain conditions under which the $G$-DPr recovers several classical implications, including the failure of the RNP for both $X$ and $X^*$, the presence of copies of $\ell_1$ and the failure of the unit ball to be an SCD set.