Augmented Rook Boards and General Product Formulas

There are a number of so-called factorization theorems for rook polynomials that have appeared in the literature. For example, Goldman, Joichi and White showed that for any Ferrers board $B = F(b_1, b_2, \ldots, b_n)$, $$\prod_{i=1}^n (x+b_i-(i-1)) = \sum_{k=0}^n r_k(B) (x)\downarrow_{n-k}$$ where $r_k(B)$ is the $k$-th rook number of $B$ and $(x)\downarrow_k = x(x-1) \cdots (x-(k-1))$ is the usual falling factorial polynomial. Similar formulas where $r_k(B)$ is replaced by some appropriate generalization of the $k$-th rook number and $(x)\downarrow_k$ is replaced by polynomials like $(x)\uparrow_{k,j} = x(x+j) \cdots (x+j(k-1))$ or $(x)\downarrow_{k,j} = x(x-j) \cdots (x-j(k-1))$ can be found in the work of Goldman and Haglund, Remmel and Wachs, Haglund and Remmel, and Briggs and Remmel. We shall refer to such formulas as product formulas. The main goal of this paper is to develop a new rook theory setting in which we can give a uniform combinatorial proof of a general product formula that includes, as special cases, essentially all the product formulas referred to above. We shall also prove $q$-analogues and $(p,q)$-analogues of our general product formula.