LINEAR & MULTILINEAR ALGEBRA, cilt.53, sa.2, ss.75-84, 2005 (SCI-Expanded)
We show that with any finite partially ordered set P (which need not be a lattice) one can associate a matrix whose determinant factors nicely. This was also noted by D.A. Smith, although his proof uses manipulations in the incidence algebra of P while ours is combinatorial, using nonintersecting paths in a digraph. As corollaries, we obtain new proofs for and generalizations of a number of results in the literature about GCD matrices and their relatives.