A complement of the Erdős-Hajnal problem on paths with equal-degree endpoints

Abstract: Answering a question of Erd\H{o}s and Hajnal, Chen and Ma proved that for all $n\geq600$ every graph with $2n + 1$ vertices and at least $n² + n+1$ edges contains two vertices of equal degree connected by a path of length three, and the complete bipartite graph $K_{n,n+1}$ shows that this edge bound is sharp. In this paper, we obtain the above result for all $n\ge2$, and thus resolve the question of Erd\H{o}s and Hajnal completely.