Prescribing a fourth order conformal invariant on the standard sphere - Part I: a perturbation result

In this paper we study some fourth order elliptic equation involving the critical Sobolev exponent, related to the prescription of a fourth order conformal invariant on the standard sphere. We use a topological method to prove the existence of at least a solution when the function to be prescribed is close to a constant and a finite dimensional map associated to it has non-zero degree.