On metric boundedness structures

Many years ago, S.-T. Hu gave necessary and sufficient conditions for a family of subsets of a metrizable space X to be the family of bounded sets for some admissible metric for the space. In this article, we show that in any noncompact metrizable space there are uncountably many distinct metric boundedness structures. Also, given an initial metric d for X, we look carefully at the problem of characterizing those boundedness structures determined by metrics uniformly equivalent to d. Applications to hyperspaces are given. Throughout, we rely on a dual approach to the study of metric boundedness.