Monotonicity and non-monotonicity results for sequential fractional delta differences of mixed order

Abstract

We consider the discrete fractional sequential difference \(\Delta _{1+a-\mu }^{\nu }\Delta _a^{\mu }f(t)\), where \(t\in \mathbb {N}_{3-\mu -\nu +a}\), in two separate cases, where in each case we require that \(\mu +\nu \in (1,2)\). In the first case, we show that when \(\mu \in (0,1)\) and \(\nu \in (1,2)\) it follows that the condition \(\Delta _{1+a-\mu }^{\nu }\Delta _a^{\mu }f(t)\ge 0\) implies that f is an increasing map when we impose that \(f(a)\ge 0\), \(\Delta f(a)\ge 0\), and \(\Delta f(a+1)\ge 0\). On the other hand, when \(\mu \in (1,2)\) and \(\nu \in (0,1)\) we demonstrate that the situation is very different and that this type of monotonicity result only holds when restricted to a proper subregion of the \((\mu ,\nu )\)-parameter space coupled with some additional auxiliary conditions.