On planar intersection graphs with forbidden subgraphs

Let C be a family of n compact connected sets in the plane, whose intersection graph G(C) has no complete bipartite subgraph with k vertices in each of its classes. Then G(C) has at most n times a polylogarithmic number of edges, where the exponent of the logarithmic factor depends on k. In the case where C consists of convex sets, we improve this bound to O(n log n). If in addition k = 2, the bound can be further improved to O(n).