Shedding vertices of vertex decomposable graphs

Abstract

We focus our attention on well-covered graphs that are vertex decomposable. We show that for many known families of these vertex decomposable graphs, the set of shedding vertices forms a dominating set. We then construct three new infinite families of well-covered graphs, none of which have this property. We use these results to provide a minimal counterexample to a conjecture of Villarreal regarding Cohen-Macaulay graphs.

23 pages; the content of the paper has been re-organized. This version will appear in Discrete Mathematics