Laplace approximations for sums of independent random vectors

Let X _i , i∈N, be i.i.d. B-valued random variables, where B is a real separable Banach space. Let Φ be a mapping B→R. Under a central limit theorem assumption, an asymptotic evaluation of Z _n = E (exp (n Φ (∑ _{i =1} ⁿ X _i /n))), up to a factor (1 + o(1)), has been gotten in Bolthausen [1]. In this paper, we show that the same asymptotic evaluation can be gotten without the central limit theorem assumption. Received: 19 September 1997 / Revised version:22 April 1999