Recognizing well-dominated graphs is coNP-complete

Abstract

A graph G is well-covered if every minimal vertex cover of G is minimum, and it is well-dominated if every minimal dominating set of G is minimum. Studies on well-covered graphs were initiated in [Plummer, JCT 1970], and well-dominated graphs were first introduced in [Finbow, Hartnell and Nowakow, AC 1988]. Well-dominated graphs are well-covered, and both classes have been widely studied in the literature. The recognition of well-covered graphs has been proved to be coNP-complete by [Chvátal and Slater, AODM 1993] and [Sankaranarayana and Stewart, Networks 1992], but the complexity of recognizing well-dominated graphs has been left open since their introduction. We close this complexity gap by proving that recognizing well-dominated graphs is coNP-complete. This solves a well-known open question (cf. [Levit and Tankus, DM 2017] and [Gözüpek, Hujdurovic and Milanič, DMTCS 2017]), which was first asked in [Caro, Sebő and Tarsi, JAlg 1996]. Although the problem has been open for a long time, our proof is surprisingly simple. Finally, we show that recognizing well-totally-dominated graphs is coNP-complete, answering a question of [Bahadır, Ekim, and Gözüpek, AMC 2021].