Boundedness and stability of solutions to difference equations

This paper is concerned with the qualitative behaviour of solutions to difference equations. We focus on boundedness and stability of solutions and we present a unified theory that applies both to autonomous and nonautonomous equations and to nonlinear equations as well as linear equations, Our presentation brings together new, established, and hard-to-find results from the literature and provides a theory that is both memorable and easy to apply. We show how the theoretical results given here relate to some of those in the established literature and by means of simple examples we indicate how the use of Lipschitz constants in this way can provide useful insights into the qualitative behaviour of solutions to some nonlinear problems including those arising in numerical analysis. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.