It has been a successful practice to define a canonical pre-ordering on a normed space using the inclusion of faces of its closed dual unit ball. This pre-ordering reflects some geometric property in a natural way. In this article, we will give an algebraic description of this pre-ordering in the case of complex C*-algebras as well as that of their self-adjoint parts. In developing our theory we introduce the essential support of an element, which is closely related to the notion of peak projections studied recently by Blecher and Hay. As applications, we give some interesting facts about weak*-closed faces, and will identify the quasi-maximal elements and the quasi-minimal elements with respects to this pre-ordering. They are closely related to the extreme points and the smooth points of the unit sphere of the C*-algebra.

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.

Let <i>C</i> be a nonempty closed convex subset of a real Hilbert space <i>H</i>. Let <i>S</i> : <i>C</i> <i>C</i> be an asymptotically nonexpansive map in the intermediate sense with the fixed point set <i>F</i>(<i>S</i>). Let <i>A</i> : <i>C</i> <i>H</i> be a Lipschitz continuous map, and <i>VI</i>(<i>C, A</i>) be the set of solutions <i>u</i> <i>C</i> of the variational inequality

We show that a compact operator A is a multiple of a positive semi-definite operator if and only if (A B) W (A) W (B), for all (rank one) operators B. An example of a normal operator is given to show that the equivalence conditions may fail in general. We then obtain conditions to identify other classes of operators A so that equivalence conditions hold.

The purpose of this paper is to construct two superimposed optimization methods for solving the mixed equilibrium problem and variational inclusion. We show that the proposed superimposed methods converge strongly to a solution of some optimization problem. Note that our methods do not involve any projection.