χ-Boundedness and Neighbourhood Complexity of Bounded Merge-Width Graphs

Marthe Bonamy, Colin Geniet

Abstract: Merge-width, recently introduced by Dreier and Toru\'nczyk, is a common generalisation of bounded expansion classes and twin-width for which the first-order model checking problem remains tractable. We prove that a number of basic properties shared by bounded expansion and bounded twin-width graphs also hold for bounded merge-width graphs: they are $\chi$-bounded, they satisfy the strong Erd\H{o}s-Hajnal property, and their neighbourhood complexity is linear.