Diversities, hyperconvexity and fixed points (Q2637017)

The investigations of the authors are motivated by Bryant and Tupper's recent work on diversities. In the present paper the connections between a hyperconvex diversity and its induced metric space are investigated. The authors first illustrate the problem of extending nonexpansive mappings from the induced metric space to the given diversity. They then prove that for a hyperconvex diversity the induced metric space need not be hyperconvex and give a sufficient condition that guarantees that it is hyperconvex. They show that in the cases of diameter or phylogenetic diversities this condition is satisfied. Moreover for a hyperconvex diversity the induced metric space need not have the fixed point property for nonexpansive mappings, even if the metric space is bounded. However if the hyperconvex diversity is bounded, then that metric space has the fixed point property for nonexpansive mappings. Finally they give a positive result on the nonempty intersection of decreasing families of hyperconvex and bounded diversities in the spirit of the well-known result due to Baillon about hyperconvex metric spaces.