ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the major results on the elasticity of factorizations in integral domains. These results may be considered as generalizing results for half-factorial domains. It includes some elementary results on elasticity and introduces semi-length functions. Much of the early investigation of factorization questions and elasticity centered on the class of Dedekind domains, or more generally, Krull domains. The chapter investigates the elasticity of Krull domains and extends the investigation to more general classes of atomic domains such as Cohen-Kaplansky domains and weakly Krull domains. It presents two generalizations of elasticity for domains. The first is the elasticity a commutative cancellative monoid, and the second is the elasticity of unique factorization domain relative to certain subsets of irreducible elements of unique factorization domain.
