Copyright © 2008 Stevo Stević and Kenneth S. Berenhaut. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper studies the boundedness, global asymptotic stability, and periodicity of positive solutions of the equation xn=f(xn−2)/g(xn−1), n∈ℕ0, where f,g∈C[(0,∞),(0,∞)]. It is shown that if f and g are nondecreasing, then for every solution of the equation the subsequences {x2n} and {x2n−1} are eventually monotone. For the case when f(x)=α+βx and g satisfies the conditions g(0)=1, g is nondecreasing, and x/g(x) is increasing, we prove that every prime periodic solution of the equation has period equal to one or two. We also investigate the global periodicity of the equation, showing that if all solutions of the equation are periodic with period three, then f(x)=c1/x and g(x)=c2x, for some positive c1 and c2.