A generalization of the Nikodým boundedness theorem (Q2382022)

The main contribution is to present an internal property that rings of sets may or may not have, and to show that the celebrated Nikodým boundedness theorem works for such rings. Recall that the Nikodým boundedness theorem tells us that for \(\sigma\)-rings setwise bounded families of finitely additive set functions are uniformly bounded. Rings and algebras where Nikodým's boundedness theorem holds are said to have the Nikodým property (N). Let \(R\) be a ring of subsets of a set \(S\). The property introduced is called the nested partition property (NPP) and goes as follows: There exists a sequence of finer and finer partitions \(P^n\) of \(S\) such that, for any sequence of pairwise disjoint sets \((E_n)\) from \(R\), there is a subsequence \((E_{n_k})\) that satisfies \(\bigcup_{k\in I} (E_{n_k}\cap A_{n_k})\in R\), for any \(I\subset \mathbb N\) and any decreasing sequence of sets \((A_n)\) taken from \(P^n\). Any \(\sigma\)-ring has (NPP). The main result of the paper is that (NPP) implies (N). The paper ends with some examples of strongly nonatomic submeasures on \(\mathbb N\) to give us examples of rings with (NPP). The reason for that is the author's observation that the ring of null sets for a strongly nonatomic submeasure \(\eta\) defined on the power set of \(S\) has (NPP).