The normal contraction property for non-bilinear Dirichlet forms

Abstract: We analyse the class of convex functionals $\mathcal E$ over $\mathrm{L}^2(X,m)$ for a measure space $(X,m)$ introduced by Cipriani and Grillo and generalising the classic bilinear Dirichlet forms. We investigate whether such non-bilinear forms verify the normal contraction property, i.e., if $\mathcal E(\phi \circ f) \leq \mathcal E(f)$ for all $f \in \mathrm{L}^2(X,m)$, and all 1-Lipschitz functions $\phi: \mathbb R \to \mathbb R$ with $\phi(0)=0$. We prove that normal contraction holds if and only if $\mathcal E$ is symmetric in the sense $\mathcal E(-f) = \mathcal E(f),$ for all $f \in \mathrm{L}^2(X,m).$ An auxiliary result, which may be of independent interest, states that it suffices to establish the normal contraction property only for a simple two-parameter family of functions $\phi$.