An approximate version of a conjecture of Aharoni and Berger

Abstract

Aharoni and Berger conjectured that in every proper edge-colouring of a bipartite multigraph by $n$ colours with at least $n+1$ edges of each colour there is a rainbow matching using every colour. This conjecture generalizes a longstanding problem of Brualdi and Stein about transversals in Latin squares. Here an approximate version of the Aharoni-Berger Conjecture is proved---it is shown that if there are at least $n+o(n)$ edges of each colour in a proper $n$-edge-colouring of a bipartite multigraph then there is a rainbow matching using every colour.