Let $G$ be a finite group and let $A\left( G \right)$ denote the Burnside ring of $G$. Then an inverse limit $L\left( G \right)$ of the groups $A\left( H \right)$ for proper subgroups $H$ of $G$ and a homomorphism res from $A\left( G \right)$ to $L\left( G \right)$ are obtained in a natural way. Let $Q\left( G \right)$ denote the cokernel of res. For a prime $p$, let $N\left( p \right)$ be the minimal normal subgroup of $G$ such that the order of ${G}/{N}\;\left( p \right)$ is a power of $p$, possibly 1. In this paper we prove that $Q\left( G \right)$ is isomorphic to the cartesian product of the groups $Q\left( {G}/{N\left( p \right)}\; \right)$, where $p$ ranges over the primes dividing the order of $G$.

This paper introduces two new Burnside rings for a finite group G, called the slice Burnside ring and the section Burnside ring. They are built as Grothendieck rings of the category of morphisms of G-sets and of Galois morphisms of G-sets, respectively. The well-known results on the usual Burnside ring, concerning ghost maps, primitive idempotents, and description of the prime spectrum, are extended to these rings. It is also shown that these two rings have a natural Green biset functor structure. The functorial structure of unit groups of these rings is also discussed.

We describe structural properties of globally defined Mackey functors related to the stratification theory of algebras. We show that over a field of characteristic zero they form a highest weight category and we also determine precisely when this category is semisimple. This approach is used to show that the Cartan matrix is often symmetric and non-singular, and we are able to compute finite parts of it in some instances. We also develop a theory of vertices of globally defined Mackey functors in the spirit of group representation theory, as well as giving information about extensions between simple functors.