Generalized transportation cost spaces (Q2295447)

The authors present two elementary constructions of metric spaces. \begin{enumerate} \item An infinite uniformly discrete metric space \(M_1\) such that the transportation cost space (a.k.a. free space, Arens-Eells space, \dots) over \(M_1\) does not contain an isometric copy of \(\ell_1\). The metric space \(M_1\) is the set \(\mathbb{N}\) equipped with the metric \(d_h(i,j)=h(\min\{i,j\})\) if \(i\neq j\) and \(d_h(i,j)=0\) if \(i=j\), where \(h: \mathbb{N}\to (1,2)\) is a strictly increasing function. \item An infinite locally finite metric space \(M_2\) such that every Banach space that contains the \(\ell_1^n\)'s isometrically but not \(\ell_1\) isometrically, will contain an isometric copy of all finite subsets of \(M_2\) but not an isometric copy of \(M_2\). In fact, it is shown that, if \(M_2\) embeds isometrically into an infinite-dimensional Banach space \(Y\), then \(Y\) must necessarily contain an isometric copy of \(\ell_1\). The metric space \(M_2\) is the subset of \(\ell_1\) consisting of vectors of the form \(\sum_{i\in A}2^ie_i\), where \(A\) is a finite subset of \(\mathbb{N}\), and \((e_i)_{i\ge 1}\) denotes the canonical basis of \(\ell_1\). \end{enumerate} The rest of the paper is a technical investigation of various semi-norms on the vector space of transportation plans on a metric space \(M\), i.e., the vector space of all finitely supported functions \(f: M\to \mathbb{R}\) such that \(\sum_{x\in M}f(x)=0\).