A generalization of Opsut's lower bounds for the competition number of a graph

Abstract

The notion of a competition graph was introduced by J. E. Cohen in 1968. The competition graph C(D) of a digraph $D$ is a (simple undirected) graph which has the same vertex set as D and has an edge between two distinct vertices x and y if and only if there exists a vertex v in D such that (x,v) and (y,v) are arcs of D. For any graph G, G together with sufficiently many isolated vertices is the competition graph of some acyclic digraph. In 1978, F. S. Roberts defined the competition number k(G) of a graph G as the minimum number of such isolated vertices. In general, it is hard to compute the competition number k(G) for a graph G and it has been one of the important research problems in the study of competition graphs to characterize a graph by its competition number. In 1982, R. J. Opsut gave two lower bounds for the competition number of a graph. In this paper, we give a generalization of these two lower bounds for the competition number of a graph.