Hierarchical Colorings of Cographs

Abstract

Cographs are exactly hereditarily well-colored graphs, i.e., the graphs for which a greedy coloring of every induced subgraph uses only the minimally necessary number of colors $\chi(G)$. In recent work on reciprocal best match graphs so-called hierarchically coloring play an important role. Here we show that greedy colorings are a special case of hierarchical coloring, which also require no more than $\chi(G)$ colors.