Decompositions into a direct sum of projective and stable submodules

Abstract: A module $M$ is said to be stable if it has no nonzero projective direct summand. For a ring $ R $, we study the conditions under which every $R$-module $M$ within a specific class can be decomposed into a direct sum of a projective module and a stable module, focusing on identifying the types of rings and the class of $R$-modules where this property holds. Some well-known classes of rings over which every finitely presented module can be decomposed into a direct sum of a projective submodule and a stable submodule are semiperfect rings or semilocal rings or rings satisfying some finiteness conditions like having finite uniform dimension or hollow dimension or being Noetherian or Artinian. By using the Auslander-Bridger transpose of modules, we prove that every finitely presented right $R$-module over a left semihereditary ring $R$ has such a decomposition; note that the semihereditary condition is on the opposite side. Our main focus in this article is to give examples where such a decomposition fails. We give some ring examples over which there exists an infinitely generated or finitely generated or cyclic module or finitely presented module or cyclically presented module where such a decomposition fails. Our main example is a cyclically presented module $M$ over a commutative ring such that~$M$ has no such decomposition and $M$ is not projectively equivalent to a stable module.