Optimal relationships between L^p-norms for the Hardy operator and its dual

We obtain sharp two-sided inequalities between $L^p$ -norms $(1<p<\infty )$ of functions $\textit{Hf}$ and $H^*f$ , where $H$ is the Hardy operator, $H^*$ is its dual, and $f$ is a nonnegative measurable function on $(0,\infty ).$ In an equivalent form, it gives sharp constants in the two-sided relationships between $L^p$ -norms of functions $H\varphi -\varphi $ and $\varphi $ , where $\varphi $ is a nonnegative nonincreasing function on $(0,+\infty )$ with $\varphi (+\infty )=0.$ In particular, it provides an alternative proof of a result obtained by Kruglyak and Setterqvist (Proc Am Math Soc 136:2005–2013, 2008) for $p=2k \,\,(k\in \mathbb N )$ and by Boza and Soria (J Funct Anal 260:1020–1028, 2011) for all $p\ge 2$ , and gives a sharp version of this result for $1<p<2$ .