New Bounds for Induced Tur\'an Problems

In a recent paper, Hunter, Milojevi\'c, Sudakov and Tomon consider the maximum number of edges in an $n$-vertex graph containing no copy of the complete bipartite graph $K_{s,s}$ and no induced copy of a "pattern" graph $H$. They conjecture that, for $s \geq |V(H)|$, this "induced extremal number" differs by at most a constant factor from the standard extremal number of $H$. Towards this, we give bounds on the induced extremal number in terms of degeneracy, which establish some non-trivial relationship between the induced and standard extremal numbers in general. We also show that (as in the case of standard extremal numbers) the induced extremal number is dominated by that of the 2-core of a single connected component. Finally, we present some graphs arising from incidence geometry which may serve as counterexamples to the conjecture.