Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
L. Fuchs has posed the problem of identifying those abelian groups that can serve as the additive structure of an injective module over some ring [1, p. 179], and in particular of identifying those abelian groups which are injective as modules over their endomorphism rings [1, p. 112]. Richman and Walker have recently answered the latter question, generalized in a non-trivial way [7], and have shown that the groups in question are of a rather restricted structure.
In this paper we consider abelian groups which are quasi-injective over their endomorphism rings. We show that divisible groups are quasi-injective as are direct sums of cyclic p-groups. Quasi-injectivity of certain direct sums (products) is characterized in terms of the summands (factors). In general it seems that the answer to the question of whether or not a group G is quasinjective over its endomorphism ring E depends on how big HomE(H, G) is, with H a fully invariant subgroup of G.