Erdős-Hajnal-type results for ordered paths

An ordered graph is a graph with a linear ordering on its vertex set. We prove that for every positive integer $k$, there exists a constant $c_k>0$ such that any ordered graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with the property that neither $G$ nor its complement contains an induced monotone path of size $k$, has either a clique or an independent set of size at least $n^{c_k}$. This strengthens a result of Bousquet, Lagoutte, and Thomassé, who proved the analogous result for unordered graphs. A key idea of the above paper was to show that any unordered graph on $n$ vertices that does not contain an induced path of size $k$, and whose maximum degree is at most $c(k)n$ for some small $c(k)>0$, contains two disjoint linear size subsets with no edge between them. This approach fails for ordered graphs, because the analogous statement is false for $k\geq 3$, by a construction of Fox. We provide further examples how this statement fails for ordered graphs avoiding other ordered trees as well.

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