Uniqueness of norm-preserving extensions of functionals on the space of compact operators

Godefroy, Kalton, and Saphar called a closed subspace $Y$ of a Banach space $Z$ an ideal if its annihilator $Y^\bot $ is the kernel of a norm-one projection $P$ on the dual space $Z^\ast $. If $Y$ is an ideal in $Z$ with respect to a projection on $Z^\ast $ whose range is norming for $Z$, then $Y$ is said to be a strict ideal. We study uniqueness of norm-preserving extensions of functionals on the space $\mathcal{K}(X,Y) $ of compact operators between Banach spaces $X$ and $Y$ to the larger space $\mathcal{K}(X,Z) $ under the assumption that $Y$ is a strict ideal in $Z$. Our main results are: (1) if $y^\ast $ is an extreme point of $B_{Y^{\ast} }$ having a unique norm-preserving extension to $Z$, and $x^{\ast\ast} \in B_{X^{\ast\ast} }$, then the only norm-preserving extension of the functional $x^{\ast\ast} \otimes y^\ast \in \mathcal {K}(X,Y)^\ast $ to $\mathcal {K}(X,Z)$ is $x^{\ast\ast} \otimes z^\ast $ where $z^\ast \in Z^\ast $ is the only norm-preserving extension of $y^\ast $ to $Z$; (2) if $\mathcal{K}(X,Y) $ is an ideal in $\mathcal{K}(X,Z) $ and $Y$ has Phelps' property $U$ in its bidual $Y^{\ast\ast} $ (i.e., every bounded linear functional on $Y$ admits a unique norm-preserving extension to $Y^{\ast\ast} $), then $\mathcal{K}(X,Y) $ has property $U$ in $\mathcal{K}(X,Z) $ whenever $X^{\ast\ast} $ has the Radon-Nikodým property.