Maximally monotone operators play a key role in modern optimization and
variational analysis. Two useful subclasses are rectangular (also known as star
monotone) and paramonotone operators, which were introduced by Brezis and
Haraux, and by Censor, Iusem and Zenios, respectively. The former class has
useful range properties while the latter class is of importance for interior
point methods and duality theory. Both notions are automatic for
subdifferential operators and known to coincide for certain matrices; however,
more precise relationships between rectangularity and paramonotonicity were not
known.
Our aim is to provide new results and examples concerning these notions. It
is shown that rectangularity and paramonotonicity are actually independent.
Moreover, for linear relations, rectangularity implies paramonotonicity but the
converse implication requires additional assumptions. We also consider
continuous linear monotone operators, and we point out that in Hilbert space
both notions are automatic for certain displacement mappings