An upper bound for the competition numbers of graphs

A hole of a graph is an induced cycle of length at least 4. Kim (2005) [2] conjectured that the competition number k(G) is bounded by h(G)+1 for any graph G, where h(G) is the number of holes of G. In Lee et al. [3], it is proved that the conjecture is true for a graph whose holes are mutually edge-disjoint. In Li et al. (2009) [4], it is proved that the conjecture is true for a graph, all of whose holes are independent. In this paper, we prove that Kim’s conjecture is true for a graph G satisfying the following condition: for each hole C of G, there exists an edge which is contained only in C among all induced cycles of G.