Direct sum decompositions of infinitely generated modules

Almost all of the basic theorems in the representation theory of finite groups have proofs that depend upon the Krull-Schmidt Theorem. Because this theorem holds only for finite-dimensional modules, however, the recent interest in infinitely generated modules raises the question of which results may hold more generally. In this paper we present an example showing that Green's Indecomposability Theorem fails for infinitely generated modules. By developing and applying some general properties of idempotent modules, we are also able to construct explicit examples of modules for which the cancellation property fails.