Structure of projectively stable Artinian rings (Q1376332)

An Artinian ring \(A\) is called left projectively stable if for any two finitely generated left \(A\)-modules \(M\) and \(N\) without projective direct summand, no nonzero homomorphism \(M\to N\) factors through a projective. Examples of such rings are left hereditary Artinian rings and certain serial rings. Actually it is shown in the paper under review that any projectively stable Artinian ring is either serial or a pullback of a left hereditary ring and a left serial ring over a semisimple ring. A more precise description is given in the paper. Moreover, projectively stable rings are characterized by combinations of various module theoretical conditions, e.g. that submodules of indecomposable projective modules should be simple or projective. Altogether in this paper and subsequent ones, the authors obtain a fairly complete picture of these rings and their representation theory. One motivation to study such rings is the authors' result [CMS Conf. Proc. 18, 343-351 (1996; Zbl 0849.16013)] that the transpose \(\text{Tr}\colon\text{mod-}A\to A\text{-mod}\) is a functor if and only if \(A\) is right projectively stable.