Description

This Memoir is both a contribution to the theory of Borel equivalence relations, considered up to Borel reducibility, and measure preserving group actions considered up to orbit equivalence. Here $E$ is said to be Borel reducible to $F$ if there is a Borel function $f$ with $x E y$ if and only if $f(x) F f(y)$. Moreover, $E$ is orbit equivalent to $F$ if the respective measure spaces equipped with the extra structure provided by the equivalence relations are almost everywhere isomorphic. We consider product groups acting ergodically and by measure preserving transformations on standard Borel probability spaces. In general terms, the basic parts of the monograph show that if the groups involved have a suitable notion of “boundary” (we make this precise with the definition of near hyperbolic), then one orbit equivalence relation can only be Borel reduced to another if there is some kind of algebraic resemblance between the product groups and coupling of the action. This also has consequence for orbit equivalence. In the case that the original equivalence relations do not have non-trivial almost invariant sets, the techniques lead to relative ergodicity results. An equivalence relation $E$ is said to be relatively ergodic to $F$ if any $f$ with $xEy \Rightarrow f(x) F f(y)$ has $[f(x)]_F$ constant almost everywhere. This underlying collection of lemmas and structural theorems is employed in a number of different ways.