On sofic actions and equivalence relations

The notion of sofic equivalence relation was introduced by Gabor Elek and Gabor Lippner. Their technics employ some graph theory. Here we define this notion in a more operator algebraic context, starting from Connes’ Embedding Problem, and prove the equivalence of these two definitions. We introduce a notion of sofic action for an arbitrary group and prove that an amalgamated product of sofic actions over amenable groups is again sofic.We also prove that an amalgamated product of sofic groups over an amenable subgroup is again sofic. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved