On the existence of certain measures appearing in distance geometry

Abstract. We prove the following result: Let X be a compact connected Hausdorff space and f be a continuous function on X x X. There exists some regular Borel probability measure m\mu on X such that the value of¶¶ ò\limit _X f(x,y)dm(y)\int\limit _X f(x,y)d\mu (y) is independent of the choice of x in X if and only if the following assertion holds: For each positive integer n and for all (not necessarily distinct) x₁,x₂,...,x_n,y₁,y₂,...,y_n in X, there exists an x in X such that¶¶ ?_i=1ⁿ f(x_i,x)=?_i=1ⁿ f(y_i,x).\sum\limits _{i=1}^n f(x_i,x)=\sum\limits _{i=1}^n f(y_i,x).