Three positive solutions of a nonlinear Dirichlet problem with competing power nonlinearities

This paper studies a nonlinear Dirichlet problem for the $p$-Laplacian operator with nonlinearity consisting of power components. The problem under consideration can be though of as a perturbation of the Ambrosetti-Brezis-Cerami problem with concave-convex nonlinearity. The combined effect of power components in the perturbed nonlinearity allows to establish a higher order multiplicity of positive solutions. We study properties of the perturbed energy functional and prove the existence of three positive solutions to the problem at hand.