In this paper, we are presenting a new method based on operator-valued Fourier multipliers to characterize the existence and uniqueness of p -solutions for discrete time fractional models in the formwhere A is a closed linear operator defined on a Banach space X and ∆ α denotes the Grünwald-Letnikov fractional derivative of order α > 0. If X is a U M D space, we provide this characterization only in terms of the R-boundedness of the operator-valued symbol associated to the abstract model. To illustrate our results, we derive new qualitative properties of nonlinear difference equations with shiftings, including fractional versions of the logistic and Nagumo equations.