Multilinear functional inequalities involving permanents, determinants, and other multilinear functions of nonnegative matrices and M-matrices

Motivated by a proof due to Fiedler of an inequality on the determinants of M-matrices and a recent paper by the authors, we now obtain various inequalities on permanents and determinants of nonsingular M-matrices. This is done by extending the multilinear considerations of Fiedler and, subsequently, of the authors, to fractional multilinear functionals on pairs of nonnegative matrices. Two examples of our results: For an n×n nonsingular M-matrix M (i) we give a sharp upper bound for det(M)+per(M), when M is a nonsingular M-matrix, (ii) we determine an upper bound on the relative error |per(M+E)-per(M)|/|per(M)|, when M+E is a certain componentwise perturbation of M.