A sharp bound for the product of weights of cross-intersecting families (Q504984)

Summary: Two families \(\mathcal{A}\) and \(\mathcal{B}\) of sets are said to be cross-intersecting if each set in \(\mathcal{A}\) intersects each set in \(\mathcal{B}\). For any two integers \(n\) and \(k\) with \(1 \leq k \leq n\), let \({[n] \choose \leq k}\) denote the family of subsets of \(\{1, \dots, n\}\) of size at most \(k\), and let \(\mathcal{S}_{n,k}\) denote the family of sets in \({[n] \choose \leq k}\) that contain 1. The author recently showed that if \(\mathcal{A} \subseteq {[m] \choose \leq r}\), \(\mathcal{B} \subseteq {[n] \choose \leq s}\), and \(\mathcal{A}\) and \(\mathcal{B}\) are cross-intersecting, then \(|\mathcal{A}||\mathcal{B}| \leq \mathcal{S}_{m,r}||\mathcal{S}_{n,s}|\). We prove a version of this result for the more general setting of weighted sets. We show that if \(g : {[m] \choose \leq r} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^+\) and \(h : {[n] \choose \leq s} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^+\) are functions that obey certain conditions, \(\mathcal{A} \subseteq {[m] \choose \leq r}\), \(\mathcal{B} \subseteq {[n] \choose \leq s}\), and \(\mathcal{A}\) and \(\mathcal{B}\) are cross-intersecting, then \[ \sum_{A \in \mathcal{A}} g(A) \sum_{B \in \mathcal{B}} h(B) \leq \sum_{C \in \mathcal{S}_{m,r}} g(C) \sum_{D \in \mathcal{S}_{n,s}} h(D). \] The bound is attained by taking \(\mathcal{A} = \mathcal{S}_{m,r}\) and \(\mathcal{B} = \mathcal{S}_{n,s}\). We also show that this result yields new sharp bounds for the product of sizes of cross-intersecting families of integer sequences and of cross-intersecting families of multisets.