On the joint embedding property for cographs and trees

Abstract

A family of graphs $\mathcal{F}$ is said to have the joint embedding property (JEP) if for every $G_1, G_2\in \mathcal{F}$, there is an $H\in \mathcal{F}$ that contains both $G_1$ and $G_2$ as induced subgraphs. If $\mathcal{F}$ is given by a finite set $S$ of forbidden induced subgraphs, it is known that determining if $\mathcal{F}$ has JEP is undecidable. We prove that this problem is decidable if $P_4\in S$ and generalize this result to families of rooted labeled trees under topological containment, bounded treewidth families under the graph minor relation, and bounded cliquewidth families under the induced subgraph relation.