Sufficient conditions for duality in homogeneous programming

A symmetric duality theory for programming problems with homogeneous objective functions was published in 1961 by Eisenberg and has been used by a number of authors since in establishing duality theorems for specific problems. In this paper, we study a generalization of Eisenberg's problem from the viewpoint of Rockafellar's very general perturbation theory of duality. The extension of Eisenberg's sufficient conditions appears as a special case of a much more general criterion for the existence of optimal vectors and lack of a duality gap. We give examples where Eisenberg's sufficient condition is not satisfied, yet optimal vectors exist, and primal and dual problems have the same value.