On the exterior Dirichlet problem for Hessian type fully nonlinear elliptic equations

. We treat the exterior Dirichlet problem for a class of fully nonlinear elliptic equations of the form f ( λ ( D 2 u )) = g ( x ) , with prescribed asymptotic behavior at infinity. The equations of this type had been studied extensively by Caffarelli–Nirenberg–Spruck [8], Trudinger [35] and many others, and there had been significant discussions on the solv- ability of the classical Dirichlet problem via the continuity method, under the assumption that f is a concave function. In this paper, based on the Perron’s method, we establish an exterior existence and uniqueness result for viscosity solutions of the equations, by assuming f to satisfy certain structure condi- tions as in [8, 35] but without requiring the concavity of f . The equations in our setting may embrace the well-known Monge–Amp`ere equations, Hessian equations and Hessian quotient equations as special cases.