Tiered trees, weights, and q-Eulerian numbers

Abstract Maxmin trees are labeled trees with the property that each vertex is either a local maximum or a local minimum. Such trees were originally introduced by Postnikov [12] , who gave a formula to count them and different combinatorial interpretations for their number. In this paper we generalize this construction and define tiered trees by allowing more than two classes of vertices. Tiered trees arise naturally when counting the absolutely indecomposable representations of certain quivers, and also when one enumerates torus orbits on certain homogeneous varieties. We define a notion of weight for tiered trees and prove bijections between various weight 0 tiered trees and other combinatorial objects; in particular order n weight 0 maxmin trees are naturally in bijection with permutations on n − 1 letters. We conclude by using our weight function to define a new q-analogue of the Eulerian numbers.