Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Let $G$ be a graph and let
$\tau $ be an assignment of nonnegative integer thresholds to the vertices of
$G$ . A subset of vertices,
$D$ , is said to be a
$\tau $ -dynamicmonopoly if
$V\left( G \right)$ can be partitioned into subsets
${{D}_{0}},\,{{D}_{1}},\,\ldots \,,\,{{D}_{k}}$ such that
${{D}_{0}}\,=\,D$ and for any
$i\,\in \,\left\{ 0,\,\ldots \,,\,k-1 \right\}$ , each vertex
$v$ in
${{D}_{i+1}}$ has at least
$\tau \left( v \right)$ neighbors in
${{D}_{0}}\cup \cdots \cup {{D}_{i}}$ . Denote the size of smallest
$\tau $ -dynamic monopoly by
$\text{dy}{{\text{n}}_{\tau }}\left( G \right)$ and the average of thresholds in
$\tau $ by
$\bar{\tau }$ . We show that the values of
$\text{dy}{{\text{n}}_{\tau }}\left( G \right)$ over all assignments
$\tau $ with the same average threshold is a continuous set of integers. For any positive number
$t$ , denote the maximum
$\text{dy}{{\text{n}}_{\tau }}\left( G \right)$ taken over all threshold assignments
$\tau $ with
$\bar{\tau }\,\le \,t$ , by
$\text{Ldy}{{\text{n}}_{t}}\left( G \right)$ . In fact,
$\text{Ldy}{{\text{n}}_{t}}\left( G \right)$ shows the worst-case value of a dynamicmonopoly when the average threshold is a given number
$t$ . We investigate under what conditions on
$t$ , there exists an upper bound for
$\text{Ldy}{{\text{n}}_{t}}\left( G \right)$ of the form
$c\left| G \right|$ , where
$c\,<\,1$ . Next, we show that
$\text{Ldy}{{\text{n}}_{t}}\left( G \right)$ is
$\text{coNP}$ -hard for planar graphs but has polynomial-time solution for forests.