A unital ring is called clean (resp. strongly clean) if every element can be written as the sum of an invertible element and an idempotent (resp. an invertible element and an idempotent that commutes). T.Y. Lam proposed a question: which von Neumann algebras are clean as rings? In this paper, we characterize strongly clean von Neumann algebras and prove that all finite von Neumann algebras and all separable infinite factors are clean.

Let A be a C*-algebra, L a closed left ideal of A and p the closed projection related to L. We show that for an xp in A**p ( A**/L**) if pAxp pAp and px*xp pAp then xp Ap ( A/L). The proof goes by interpreting elements of A**p (resp. Ap) as admissible (resp. continuous admissible) vector sections over the base space F(p) = { A* : 0, (p) = 1} in the notions developed by Diximier and Douady, Fell, and Tomita. We consider that our results complement both Kadison function representation and Takesaki duality theorem.

We establish the no trade principle, ie, the no trade theorem and its converse, for any dual pair of bet and extended belief spaces, defined on a given measurable space. A key condition is that, except perhaps one of the agents, everyone else has (weak*) compact sets of beliefs. We find out that in most of the models of uncertainty adopted in the economic literature, roughly speaking, the epistemic statement that an agent has a compact set of beliefs is equivalent to the economic statement that he has an open cone of positive bets. This improves our understanding of what compactness actually means within an economic context.

We introduce a new implicit iterative scheme with perturbation for finding the approximate solutions of a hierarchical variational inequality, that is, a variational inequality over the common fixed point set of a finite family of nonexpansive mappings. We establish some convergence theorems for the sequence generated by the proposed implicit iterative scheme. In particular, necessary and sufficient conditions for the strong convergence of the sequence are obtained.

Let X and X be compact Hausdorff spaces, and X , X be Banach lattices. Let X denote the Banach lattice of all continuous X -valued functions on X equipped with the pointwise ordering and the sup norm. We prove that if there exists a Riesz isomorphism X such that X is non-vanishing on X if and only if X is non-vanishing on X , then X is homeomorphic to X , and X is Riesz isomorphic to X . In this case, X can be written as a weighted composition operator: X , where X is a homeomorphism from X onto X , and X is a Riesz isomorphism from X onto X for every X in X . This generalizes some known results obtained recently.