Abstract We provide a complete classification, up to order-isomorphism, of all possible Wadge hierarchies on zero-dimensional Polish spaces using (essentially) countable ordinals as complete invariants. We also observe that although our assignment of invariants is very simple and there are only $ \aleph _1 $ -many equivalence classes, the above classification problem is quite complex from the descriptive set-theoretic point of view: in particular, there is no Borel procedure to determine whether two zero-dimensional Polish spaces have isomorphic Wadge hierarchies. All results are based on a complete and explicit description of the Wadge hierarchy on an arbitrary zero-dimensional Polish space, depending on its topological properties.

The structure of the Wadge degrees on zero-dimensional spaces is very simple (almost well ordered), but for many other natural nonzero-dimensional spaces (including the space of reals) this structure is much more complicated. We consider weaker notions of reducibility, including the so-called Δ0α-reductions, and try to find for various natural topological spaces X the least ordinal αX such that for every αX ⩽ β < ω1 the degree-structure induced on X by the Δ0β-reductions is simple (i.e. similar to the Wadge hierarchy on the Baire space). We show that αX ⩽ ω for every quasi-Polish space X, that αX ⩽ 3 for quasi-Polish spaces of dimension ≠ ∞, and that this last bound is in fact optimal for many (quasi-)Polish spaces, including the real line and its powers.

Abstract We give a full description of the structure under inclusion of all finite level Borel classes of functions, and provide an elementary proof of the well-known fact that not every Borel function can be written as a countable union of Σα0-measurable functions (for every fixed 1 ≤ α < ω1). Moreover, we present some results concerning those Borel functions which are ω-decomposable into continuous functions (also called countably continuous functions in the literature): such results should be viewed as a contribution towards the goal of generalizing a remarkable theorem of Jayne and Rogers to all finite levels, and in fact they allow us to prove some restricted forms of such generalizations. We also analyze finite level Borel functions in terms of composition of simpler functions, and we finally present an application to Banach space theory.

Abstract Louveau and Rosendal [5] have shown that the relation of bi-embeddability for countable graphs as well as for many other natural classes of countable structures is complete under Borel reducibility for analytic equivalence relations. This is in strong contrast to the case of the isomorphism relation, which as an equivalence relation on graphs (or on any class of countable structures consisting of the models of a sentence of ) is far from complete (see [5, 2]). In this article we strengthen the results of [5] by showing that not only does bi-embeddability give rise to analytic equivalence relations which are complete under Borel reducibility, but in fact any analytic equivalence relation is Borel equivalent to such a relation. This result and the techniques introduced answer questions raised in [5] about the comparison between isomorphism and bi-embeddability. Finally, as in [5] our results apply not only to classes of countable structures defined by sentences of , but also to discrete metric or ultrametric Polish spaces, compact metrizable topological spaces and separable Banach spaces, with various notions of embeddability appropriate for these classes, as well as to actions of Polish monoids.

Abstract In [9] we have considered a wide class of “well-behaved” reducibilities for sets of reals. In this paper we continue with the study of Borel reducibilities by proving a dichotomy theorem for the degree-structures induced by good Borel reducibilities. This extends and improves the results of [9] allowing to deal with a larger class of notions of reduction (including, among others, the Baire class ξ functions).

Abstract We show that if ℱ is any “well-behaved” subset of the Borel functions and we assume the Axiom of Determinacy then the hierarchy of degrees on (ωω) induced by ℱ turns out to look like the Wadge hierarchy (which is the special case where ℱ is the set of continuous functions).