On Local LYM Identities

The LYMinequality (Lubell, Yamamoto, Meshalkin) is a generalization of Sperner’s theorem for antichains. Kleitman and Harper independently proved that the LYM inequality and the normalized matching property (or local LYM inequality) are equivalent. Many contributions have been proposed to sharpen the LYM inequality. Noticeably, Ahlswede and Zhang lifted the LYM inequality to an identity, called the AZ identity. Thus, one expects that the same sharpening of the local LYM inequality is equivalent to the AZ identity. In this paper, we introduce a local LYM identity which sharpens the local LYM inequality and prove that it is equivalent to the AZ identity. The local LYM identity shows local relationships between components in the AZ identity.