Inequalities for symmetric means

We study Muirhead-type generalizations of families of inequalities due to Newton, Maclaurin and others. Each family is defined in terms of a commonly used basis of the ring of symmetric functions in nn variables. Inequalities corresponding to elementary symmetric functions and power sum symmetric functions are characterized by the same simple poset which generalizes the majorization order. Some analogous results are also obtained for the Schur, homogeneous, and monomial cases.