New Pólya-Szegö-type inequalities and an alternative approach to comparison results for PDE's

We prove some Pólya-Szegö type inequalities which involve couples of functions and their rearrangements. Our inequalities reduce to the classical Pólya-Szegö principle when the two functions coincide. As an application, we give a different proof of a comparison result for solutions to Dirichlet boundary value problems for Laplacian equations proved in [1].