Abstract We study two classes of nonhomogeneous elliptic problems with Dirichlet boundary condition and involving a fourth-order differential operator with variable exponent and power-type nonlinearities. The first result of this paper establishes the existence of a nontrivial weak solution in the case of a small perturbation of the right-hand side. The proof combines variational methods, including the Ekeland variational principle and the mountain pass theorem of Ambrosetti and Rabinowitz. Next we consider a very…