Perfect fractional matchings in k-out hypergraphs

Extending the notion of (random) k-out graphs, we consider when the k-out hypergraph is likely to have a perfect fractional matching. In particular, we show that for each r there is a k=k(r) such that the k-out r-uniform hypergraph on n vertices has a perfect fractional matching with high probability (i.e., with probability tending to 1 as n→∞) and prove an analogous result for r-uniform r-partite hypergraphs. This is based on a new notion of hypergraph expansion and the observation that sufficiently expansive hypergraphs admit perfect fractional matchings. As a further application, we give a short proof of a stopping-time result originally due to Krivelevich.