Orienting Borel graphs

Abstract

We investigate when a Borel graph admits a (Borel or measurable) orientation with outdegree bounded by k k for various cardinals k k . We show that for a probability measure preserving (p.m.p) graph G G , a measurable orientation can be found when k k is larger than the normalized cost of the restriction of G G to any positive measure subset. Using an idea of Conley and Tamuz, we can also find Borel orientations of graphs with subexponential growth; however, for every k k we also find graphs which admit measurable orientations with outdegree bounded by k k but no such Borel orientations. Finally, for special values of k k we bound the projective complexity of Borel k k -orientability for graphs and graphings of equivalence relations. It follows from these bounds that the set of equivalence relations admitting a Borel selector is Σ 2 1 \mathbf {\Sigma }_{2}^{1} in the codes, in stark contrast to the case of smooth relations.