Catalan pairs and Fishburn triples

Abstract: Disanto, Ferrari, Pinzani and Rinaldi have introduced the concept of 'Catalan pair', which is a pair of partial orders (S,R) satisfying certain axioms. They have shown that Catalan pairs provide a natural description of objects belonging to several classes enumerated by Catalan numbers. In this paper, we first introduce another axiomatic structure (T,R), which we call the 'Catalan pair of type 2', which describes certain Catalan objects that do not seem to have an easy interpretation in terms of the original Catalan pairs. We then introduce 'Fishburn triples', which are relational structures obtained as a direct common generalization of the two types of Catalan pairs. Fishburn triples encode, in a natural way, the structure of objects enumerated by the Fishburn numbers, such as interval orders or Fishburn matrices. This connection between Catalan objects and Fishburn objects allows us to associate known statistics on Catalan objects with analogous statistics of Fishburn objects. As our main result, we then show that several known equidistribution results on Catalan statistics can be generalized to analogous results for Fishburn statistics.