INVARIANT EXPECTATIONS AND VANISHING OF BOUNDED COHOMOLOGY FOR EXACT GROUPS

Abstract

We study exactness of groups and establish a characterization of exact groups in terms of the existence of a continuous linear operator, called an invariant expectation, whose properties make it a weak counterpart of an invariant mean on a group. We apply this operator to show that exactness of a finitely generated group G implies the vanishing of the bounded cohomology of G with coefficients in a new class of modules, which are defined using the Hopf algebra structure of ℓ1(G).