Practical tests for the Schröder equation to have a regularly varying solution (Q2314857)

Assume that we are given a function \(f: \mathbb{R}^+\to \mathbb{R}\) that satisfies the following three conditions: \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] \(f\) is an increasing continuous function of \(\mathbb{R}^+\) into itself. \item[(ii)] \(f (x) < x\) for all \(x\in \mathbb{R}^+\). \item[(iii)] the limit \(\lim_{x\to 0^+}\frac{f(x)}{x}\) exists. \end{itemize} The aim of this paper is to give practical criteria on \(f\) such that the Schröder equation \[ \sigma(f (x)) = d\sigma(x) \qquad (x\in \mathbb{R}^+, 0 < d < 1)\tag{1} \] admits a regularly varying solution, where a given \(\sigma : \mathbb{R}^+ \to\mathbb{R}^+\) is called regularly varying with index \(\kappa\) provided that for every \(\lambda\in \mathbb{R}^+\) the relation \[ \lim_{x\to 0^+}\frac{\sigma(\lambda x)}{\sigma(x)}=\lambda^{\kappa} \] holds. In the case \(\kappa = 1\), we say that \(\sigma\) is unitally varying. The function \(\sigma\) is called uniformly regularly varying if the preceding relation holds locally uniformly with respect to \(\lambda\). It is reasonable to expect a regularly varying solutions of Equation (1) due to the fact that it makes the solution of (1) unique up to a multiplicative constant. Although in the literature several interesting criteria have been presented for Equation (1) to have a continuous regularly varying solution, only a few of them are practical and can be checked by hand. Therefore, the main achievement of this paper is that the author associates to \(f\) a sequence \(\{u_0 , u_1 , \dots\}\) of continuous functions of \([0, 1]\) onto itself in such a way that the desired solution exists if and only if the iterative sequence \[ U_n = u_n \circ u_{n-1} \circ \dots \circ u_0 \] converges uniformly. Three tests are presented: the norm test, the root test of iterations and the alternating iterative sequence test.