English

Centers of probability measures without the mean

Probability 2017-04-25 v2

Abstract

In the recent years, the notion of mixability has been developed with applications to optimal transportation, quantitative finance and operations research. An nn-tuple of distributions is said to be jointly mixable if there exist nn random variables following these distributions and adding up to a constant, called center, with probability one. When the nn distributions are identical, we speak of complete mixability. If each distribution has finite mean, the center is obviously the sum of the means. In this paper, we investigate the set of centers of completely and jointly mixable distributions not having a finite mean. In addition to several results, we show the (possibly counterintuitive) fact that, for each n2n \geq 2, there exist nn standard Cauchy random variables adding up to a constant CC if and only if Cnlog(n1)π.|C|\le\frac{n\,\log (n-1)}{\pi}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.02660,
  title  = {Centers of probability measures without the mean},
  author = {Giovanni Puccetti and Pietro Rigo and Bin Wang and Ruodu Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.02660},
  year   = {2017}
}