Near-domination in graphs

Abstract

A vertex u of a graph t-dominates a vertex v if there are at most t vertices different from u,v that are adjacent to v and not to u; and a graph is t-dominating if for every pair of distinct vertices, one of them t-dominates the other. Our main result says that if a graph is t-dominating, then it is close (in an appropriate sense) to being 0-dominating. We also show that an analogous statement for digraphs is false; and discuss some connections with the Erdos-Hajnal conjecture.