We aim to investigate the dimension theory of \(\alpha \) -pressure-like quantities. By means of the Carath \(\acute{\textrm{e}}\) odory-Pesin structure, we define \(\alpha \) -BS dimension and \(\alpha \) -Pesin topological pressure on subsets using \(\alpha \) -Bowen metric \(\begin{aligned} d_{n}^{\alpha }(x,y)=\max _{0\le i\le n-1}e^{\alpha i}d(f^{i}x,f^{i}y), \end{aligned}\) where \(\alpha \ge 0\) . Specifically, we show that \(\alpha \) -BS dimension and \(\alpha \) -Pesin topological pressure are related by a Bowen’s equation. Inspired by the classical Brin–Katok entropy, we introduce the notion of \(\alpha \) -local Brin–Katok entropy, and establish a variational principle for \(\alpha \) -BS dimension on compact subsets in terms of \(\alpha \) -local Brin–Katok entropy. Besides, for subshifts of finite type, we prove that \(\alpha \) -Bowen topological entropy is closely related to spectral radius and Hausdorff dimension.