Dedicated to Mietek Borowiecki on the occasion of his seventieth birthday CHOICE-PERFECT GRAPHS

Given a graphG = (V,E) and a set Lv of admissible colors for each vertex v ∈ V (termed the list at v), a list coloring of G is a (proper) vertex coloring φ : V → ⋃ v∈V Lv such that φ(v) ∈ Lv for all v ∈ V and φ(u) 6= φ(v) for all uv ∈ E. If such a φ exists, G is said to be list colorable. The choice number of G is the smallest natural number k for which G is list colorable whenever each list contains at least k colors. In this note we initiate the study of graphs in which the choice number equals the clique number or the chromatic number in every induced subgraph. We call them choice-ω-perfect and choice-χ-perfect graphs, respectively. The main result of the paper states that the square of every cycle is choice-χ-perfect.