THE CORES OF PAIRED-DOMINATION GAMES

Velzen introduced the rigid and relaxed dominating set games and showed that the rigid game being balanced is equivalent to the relaxed game being balanced in 2004. After then various variants of dominating set games were introduced and it was shown that for each variant, a rigid game being balanced is equivalent to a relaxed game being balanced. It is natural to ask if for any other variant of dominating set game, the balancedness of a rigid game and the balancedness of a relaxed game are equivalent. In this paper, we show that the answer for the question is negative by considering the rigid and relaxed paired-domination games, which is considered as a variant of dominating set games. We characterize the cores of both games and show that the rigid game being balanced is not equivalent to the relaxed game being balanced. In addition, we study the cores of paired-dominations games on paths and cycles.