The Banzhaf index in complete and incomplete shareholding structures: A new algorithm

In this global world, many firms present a complex shareholding structure with indirect participation, such that it may become difficult to assess a firm’s controllers. Furthermore, if there are numerous dominant shareholders, the control can be shared between them. Determining who has the most influence is often a difficult task. To measure this influence, game theory allows the modeling of voting games and the computing of the Banzhaf index. This paper firstly offers a new algorithm to compute this index in all structures and then suggests some modelisations of the floating shareholder. Then, our model is applied to a real case study: the French group Lafarge. This exemplary case demonstrates how the float’s structure and hidden coalition can impact the power relationship between dominant shareholders.     

Cohen–Macaulayness of monomial ideals and symbolic powers of Stanley–Reisner ideals

We present criteria for the Cohen–Macaulayness of a monomial ideal in terms of its primary decomposition. These criteria allow us to use tools of graph theory and of linear programming to study the Cohen–Macaulayness of monomial ideals which are intersections of prime ideal powers. We can characterize the Cohen–Macaulayness of the second symbolic power or of all symbolic powers of a Stanley–Reisner ideal in terms of the simplicial complex. These characterizations show that the simplicial complex must be very compact if some symbolic power is Cohen–Macaulay. In particular, all symbolic powers are Cohen–Macaulay if and only if the simplicial complex is a matroid complex. We also prove that the Cohen–Macaulayness can pass from a symbolic power to another symbolic powers in different ways.     

Research problems from the BCC22

Open problems from the problem session at the 22nd British Combinatorial Conference at St Andrews, on 10 July 2009.     

The critical group of <Emphasis Type="Italic">K</Emphasis><Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">m</Emphasis></Subscript> × <Emphasis Type="Italic">C</Emphasis><Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis></Subscript>

In this paper, the structure of the critical group of the graph K _m × C _n is determined, where m, n ≥ 3.     

A Toughness Condition for Fractional (k,m)-deleted Graphs Revisited

In computer networks, toughness is an important parameter which is used to measure the vulnerability of the network. Zhou et al. obtains a toughness condition for a graph to be fractional (k, m)-deleted and presents an example to show the sharpness of the toughness bound. In this paper, we remark that the previous example does not work and inspired by this fact, we present a new toughness condition for fractional (k, m)-deleted graphs improving the existing one. Finally, we state an open problem.     

A class of highly symmetric graphs,symmetric cylindrical constructions and their spectra

In this article, we introduce the algebra of block-symmetric cylinders and we show that symmetric cylindrical constructions on base-graphs admitting commutative decompositions behave as generalized tensor products. We compute the characteristic polynomial of such symmetric cylindrical constructions in terms of the spectra of the base-graph and the cylinders in a general setting. This gives rise to a simultaneous generalization of some well-known results on the spectra of a variety of graph amalgams, as various graph products, graph subdivisions and generalized Petersen graph constructions. While our main result introduces a connection between spectral graph theory and commutative decompositions of graphs, we focus on commutative cyclic decompositions of complete graphs and tree-cylinders along with a subtle group labeling of trees to introduce a class of highly symmetric graphs containing the Petersen and the Coxeter graphs. Also, using techniques based on recursive polynomials we compute the characteristic polynomials of these highly symmetric graphs as an application of our main result.     

Circulant Double Coverings of a Circulant Graph of Valency Four

Several isomorphism classes of graph coverings of a graph G have been enumerated by many authors (see [3], [8]–[15]). A covering of G is called circulant if its covering graph is circulant. Recently, the authors [4] enumerated the isomorphism classes of circulant double coverings of a certain kind, called typical, and showed that no double covering of a circulant graph of valency 3 is circulant. In this paper, the isomorphism classes of connected circulant double coverings of a circulant graph of valency 4 are enumerated. As a consequence, it is shown that no double covering of a non-circulant graph G of valency 4 can be circulant if G is vertex-transitive or G has a prime power of vertices. The first author is supported by NSF of China (No. 60473019) and by NKBRPC (2004CB318000), and the second author is supported by Com²MaC-KOSEF (R11-1999-054) in Korea.     

The structure of sets with few sums along a graph

We present common generalizations of some structure results of Freiman, Ruzsa, Balog-Szemerédi and Laczkovich-Ruzsa. We also give some applications to Combinatorial Geometry and Algebra, some of which generalize the aforementioned structure results even further.     

The partition problem

In this paper we describe several forms of thek-partition problem and give integer programming formulations of each case. The dimension of the associated polytopes and some basic facets are identified. We also give several valid and facet defining inequalities for each of the polytopes.Partial Support from NSF Grants DMS 8606188 and ECS 8800281 is gratefully acknowledged.     

About a new class of matroid-inducing packing families

Let T be a family of graphs. A T-packing of a graph G is a subgraph of G, components of which are isomorphic to members of T. We are concerned with families T, such that in every graph G, the subsets of vertices that can be saturated by some T-packing form a collection of independent sets of a matroid. The main purpose of this paper is to introduce a new class of families with this property.