The critical value of the contact process with added and removed edges (Q2576808)

In this short well-written paper the author studies the influence of edding/removing finitely many edges of a vertex-transitive graph \(\mathcal{G}\) on the global survival critical value of the contact process on \(\mathcal{G}\). The answer got in the paper is that the mentioned transformation of the graph does not change the critical value. A number of topics connected with this result and/or with its proof have also been discussed. For the recent development on this subject see \textit{R. Pemantle} and \textit{A. M. Stacey} [Ann. Probab. 29, No.~4, 1563--1590 (2001; Zbl 1013.60078)].