A family of partially ordered sets with small balance constant (Q1630895)

Summary: Given a finite poset \(\mathcal{P}\) and two distinct elements \(x\) and \(y\), we let \(\operatorname{pr}_{\mathcal{P}}(x \prec y)\) denote the fraction of linear extensions of \(\mathcal{P}\) in which \(x\) precedes \(y\). The balance constant \(\delta(\mathcal{P})\) of \(\mathcal{P}\) is then defined by \[ \delta(\mathcal{P}) = \max_{x \neq y \in \mathcal{P}} \min \{\operatorname{pr}_{\mathcal{P}}(x \prec y), \operatorname{pr}_{\mathcal{P}}(y \prec x)\}. \] The \(1/3\)-\(2/3\) conjecture asserts that \(\delta(\mathcal{P}) \geq\frac{1}{3}\) whenever \(\mathcal{P}\) is not a chain, but except from certain trivial examples it is not known when equality occurs, or even if balance constants can approach \(1/3\). In this paper we make some progress on the conjecture by exhibiting a sequence of posets with balance constants approaching \(\frac{1}{32}(93-\sqrt{6697}) \approx 0.3488999\), answering a question of Brightwell. These provide smaller balance constants than any other known nontrivial family.