Quantitative property A, Poincaré inequalities, L ^p-compression and L^p-distortion for metric measure spaces

We introduce a quantitative version of Property A in order to estimate the L^p-compressions of a metric measure space X. We obtain various estimates for spaces with sub-exponential volume growth. This quantitative property A also appears to be useful to yield upper bounds on the L ^p-distortion of finite metric spaces. Namely, we obtain new optimal results for finite subsets of homogeneous Riemannian manifolds. We also introduce a general form of Poincaré inequalities that provide constraints on compressions, and lower bounds on distortion. These inequalities are used to prove the optimality of some of our results.