Majority colorings of sparse digraphs (Q2030755)

Summary: A majority coloring of a directed graph is a vertex-coloring in which every vertex has the same color as at most half of its out-neighbors. \textit{S. Kreutzer} et al. [Electron. J. Comb. 24, No. 2, Research Paper P2.25, 9 p. (2017; Zbl 1364.05029)] proved that every digraph has a majority 4-coloring and conjectured that every digraph admits a majority 3-coloring. They observed that the Local Lemma implies the conjecture for digraphs of large enough minimum out-degree if, crucially, the maximum in-degree is bounded by an (exponential) function of the minimum out-degree. Our goal in this paper is to develop alternative methods that allow the verification of the conjecture for natural, broad digraph classes, without any restriction on the in-degrees. Among others, we prove the conjecture 1) for digraphs with chromatic number at most 6 or dichromatic number at most \(3\), and thus for all planar digraphs; and 2) for digraphs with maximum out-degree at most 4. The benchmark case of \(r\)-regular digraphs remains open for \(r \in [5,143]\). Our inductive proofs depend on loaded inductive statements about precoloring extensions of list-colorings. This approach also gives rise to stronger conclusions, involving the choosability version of majority coloring. We also give further evidence towards the existence of majority-3-colorings by showing that every digraph has a fractional majority 3.9602-coloring. Moreover we show that every digraph with large enough minimum out-degree has a fractional majority \((2+\varepsilon)\)-coloring.