Profile decomposition for sequences of Borel measures

Abstract: We prove that, if dichotomy occurs when the concentration-compactness principle is used, the dichotomizing sequence can be choosen so that a nontrivial part of it concentrates. Iterating this argument leads to a profile decomposition for arbitrary sequences of bounded Borel measures. To illustrate our results we give an application to the structure of bouded sequences in the Sobolev space $ W^{1, p}(\R^N)$.