Volume ratios for Cartesian products of convex bodies

The paper is devoted to the behavior of volume ratios, the modified Banach–Mazur distance, and the vertex index for sums of convex bodies. It is shown that sup d ( A ⊕ K , B ⊕ L ) ≥ sup ∂ ( A ⊕ K , B ⊕ L ) ≥ c ⋅ n 1 − k + k ′ 2 n , \begin{equation*} \sup d (\mathrm {A}\oplus \mathrm {K},\mathrm {B}\oplus \mathrm {L}) \geq \sup \partial (\mathrm {A}\oplus \mathrm {K},\mathrm {B}\oplus \mathrm {L}) \geq c \cdot n^{1-\frac {k+k’}{2n}}, \end{equation*} if K ⊂ R n \mathrm {K}\subset \mathbb {R}^n and L ⊂ R k \mathrm {L}\subset \mathbb {R}^k are convex and symmetric (the supremum is taken over all symmetric convex bodies A ⊂ R n − k \mathrm {A}\subset \mathbb {R}^{n-k} and B ⊂ R n − k ′ ) \mathrm {B}\subset \mathbb {R}^{n-k’}) . Furthermore, some examples are discussed that show that the available extimates of the vertex index in terms of the volume ratio are not sharp.