Authors: Benjamin Doerr ¹; Michael Gnewuch ²; Nils Hebbinghaus

• 1 Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
• 2 Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in den Naturwissenschaften

For a hypergraph $\mathcal{H} = (V,\mathcal{E})$, its $d$―fold symmetric product is $\Delta^d \mathcal{H} = (V^d,\{ E^d | E \in \mathcal{E} \})$. We give several upper and lower bounds for the $c$-color discrepancy of such products. In particular, we show that the bound $\textrm{disc}(\Delta^d \mathcal{H},2) \leq \textrm{disc}(\mathcal{H},2)$ proven for all $d$ in [B. Doerr, A. Srivastav, and P. Wehr, Discrepancy of Cartesian products of arithmetic progressions, Electron. J. Combin. 11(2004), Research Paper 5, 16 pp.] cannot be extended to more than $c = 2$ colors. In fact, for any $c$ and $d$ such that $c$ does not divide $d!$, there are hypergraphs having arbitrary large discrepancy and $\textrm{disc}(\Delta^d \mathcal{H},c) = \Omega_d(\textrm{disc}(\mathcal{H},c)^d)$. Apart from constant factors (depending on $c$ and $d$), in these cases the symmetric product behaves no better than the general direct product $\mathcal{H}^d$, which satisfies $\textrm{disc}(\mathcal{H}^d,c) = O_{c,d}(\textrm{disc}(\mathcal{H},c)^d)$.