Continuous essential selections and integral functionals

Abstract: Given a strictly positive measure, we characterize inner semicontinuous solid convex-valued mappings for which continuous functions which are selections almost everywhere are selections. This class contains continuous mappings as well as fully lower semicontinuous closed convex-valued mappings that arise in variational analysis and optimization of integral functionals. The characterization allows for extending existing results on convex conjugates of integral functionals on continuous functions. We also give an application to integral functionals on left continuous functions of bounded variation.