A Δ-point x of a Banach space is a norm-one element that is arbitrarily close to convex combinations of elements in the unit ball that are almost at distance 2 from x. If, in addition, every point in the unit ball is arbitrarily close to such convex combinations, x is a Daugavet point. A Banach space X has the Daugavet property if and only if every norm-one element is a Daugavet point. We show that Δ- and Daugavet points are the same in L1-spaces, in L1-preduals, as well as in a big class of Müntz spaces. We also provide an example of a Banach space where all points on the unit sphere are Δ-points, but none of them are Daugavet points. We also study the property that the unit ball is the closed convex hull of its Δ-points. This gives rise to a new diameter-two property that we call the convex diametral diameter-two property. We show that all C(K) spaces, K infinite compact Hausdorff, as well as all Müntz spaces have this property. Moreover, we show that this property is stable under absolute sums.

We study the Daugavet property in tensor products of Banach spaces. We show that $L_{1}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D707})\widehat{\otimes }_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}}L_{1}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D708})$ has the Daugavet property when $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}$ are purely non-atomic measures. Also, we show that $X\widehat{\otimes }_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}}Y$ has the Daugavet property provided $X$ and $Y$ are $L_{1}$-preduals with the Daugavet property, in particular, spaces of continuous functions with this property. With the same techniques, we also obtain consequences about roughness in projective tensor products as well as the Daugavet property of projective symmetric tensor products.

We show that for spaces with 1–unconditional bases lushness, the alternative Daugavet property and numerical index 1 are equivalent. In the class of rearrangement invariant (r.i.) sequence spaces the only examples of spaces with these properties are ${{c}_{0,}}{{\ell }_{1}}$ and ${{\ell }_{\infty }}$. The only lush r.i. separable function space on $\left[ 0,1 \right]$ is ${{L}_{1}}\left[ 0,1 \right]$; the same space is the only r.i. separable function space on $\left[ 0,1 \right]$ with the Daugavet property over the reals.

We prove that the space $L_\infty(\mu,X)$ has the same numerical index as the Banach space $X$ for every $\sigma$-finite measure $\mu$. We also show that $L_\infty(\mu,X)$ has the Daugavet property if and only if $X$ has or $\mu$ is atomless.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 46B20; 47A12