On Kirk's asymptotic contractions

Recently Kirk introduced the notion of asymptotic contractions on a metric space and using ultrapower techniques he obtained an asymptotic version of the Boyd-Wong fixed point theorem. In this paper we extend this result and moreover, we give a constructive proof of it. Furthermore, we obtain a complete characterization of asymptotic contractions on a compact metric space. As a by-product we establish a separation theorem for upper semicontinuous functions satisfying some limit condition.