On the Palais–Smale condition

We present a new sufficient assumption weaker than the classical Ambrosetti–Rabinowitz condition which guarantees the boundedness of (PS) sequences. Moreover, we relax the standard subcritical polynomial growth condition ensuring the compactness of a bounded (PS) sequences. We also revise the Costa–Magalhaes condition [8] to obtain Cerami condition. As a consequence, some existence results derived by minimax methods were proved. Finally, we establish the existence of positive solution under the subcritical polynomial growth condition, while the strong superlinear condition is only required along an unbounded sequence. In other words, a certain degraded oscillation is allowed.