Volume of the Minkowski sums of star-shaped sets.

For a compact set A \subset \mathbb {R}^d and an integer k\ge 1, let us denote by \begin{equation*} A[k] = \left \{a_1+\cdots +a_k: a_1, \ldots, a_k\in A\right \}=\sum _{i=1}^k A \end{equation*} the Minkowski sum of k copies of A. A theorem of Shapley, Folkmann and Starr (1969) states that \frac {1}{k}A[k] converges to the convex hull of A in Hausdorff distance as k tends to infinity. Bobkov, Madiman and Wang [ Concentration, functional inequalities and isoperimetry , Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2011] conjectured that the volume of \frac {1}{k}A[k] is nondecreasing in k, or in other words, in terms of the volume deficit between the convex hull of A and \frac {1}{k}A[k], this convergence is monotone. It was proved by Fradelizi, Madiman, Marsiglietti and Zvavitch [C. R. Math. Acad. Sci. Paris 354 (2016), pp. 185–189] that this conjecture holds true if d=1 but fails for any d \geq 12. In this paper we show that the conjecture is true for any star-shaped set A \subset \mathbb {R}^d for d=2 and d=3 and also for arbitrary dimensions d \ge 4 under the condition k \ge (d-1)(d-2). In addition, we investigate the conjecture for connected sets and present a counterexample to a generalization of the conjecture to the Minkowski sum of possibly distinct sets in \mathbb {R}^d, for any d \geq 7. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]