Doubling Argument of the Hessian Estimate for the Hessian Quotient Equations

Abstract

In this paper, we establish a doubling argument to obtain Hessian estimates for convex solutions to the Hessian quotient equation $\frac{{\sigma }_n}{{\sigma }_k}(D^{2}u)=f(x,u,Du)$ for $k=n-1$ and $k=n-2$ under the condition that $\log f$ is convex in the $Du$ variable. In particular, our approach is pointwise and does not make use of the Legendre transform or integral-based local maximum principles. We provide a counterexample demonstrating that interior estimates can fail if no structural assumption is imposed on $f$ in the $Du$ variable. Finally, we extend our doubling argument to general Hessian quotient equations $\frac{{\sigma }_l}{{\sigma }_k}(D^{2}u)=f(x,u,Du)$ for $k\in \{l-1,l-2\}$, under a similar structural condition imposed on $f$ in the $Du$ variable, alongside an additional structural concavity assumption on the operator introduced by Lu-Tsai 2026, which has very recently been established in independent works.

41 pages; updated references; slightly relaxed the assumption on the gradient variable; added a remark on the recent establishment of the concavity assumption