On a question of Gross

Using the notion of weighted sharing of sets we prove two uniqueness theorems which improve the results proved by Fang and Qiu [H. Qiu, M. Fang, A unicity theorem for meromorphic functions, Bull. Malaysian Math. Sci. Soc. 25 (2002) 31–38], Lahiri and Banerjee [I. Lahiri, A. Banerjee, Uniqueness of meromorphic functions with deficient poles, Kyungpook Math. J. 44 (2004) 575–584] and Yi and Lin [H.X. Yi,W.C. Lin, Uniqueness theorems concerning a question of Gross, Proc. Japan Acad. Ser. A 80 (2004) 136–140] and thus provide an answer to the question of Gross [F. Gross, Factorization of meromorphic functions and some open problems, in: Proc. Conf. Univ. Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1976, in: Lecture Notes in Math., vol. 599, Springer, Berlin, 1977, pp. 51–69], under a weaker hypothesis. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved