On the Golomb-Dickman constant under Ewens sampling
Abstract
We define a generalized Golomb--Dickman constant as the limiting expected proportion of the longest cycle in random permutations under the Ewens measure with parameter . Exploiting the independence properties of Kingman's Poisson process construction of the Poisson--Dirichlet distribution, we obtain an explicit integral representation for in terms of the exponential integral. The dependence of on reflects the transition between regimes dominated by long cycles (small ) and those with many small cycles (large ). We also derive the asymptotic behavior of for small and large and illustrate our results with numerical computations, Monte Carlo simulations of the Hoppe urn, and an application.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.23175,
title = {On the Golomb-Dickman constant under Ewens sampling},
author = {José Ricardo G. Mendonça and Luis Jehiel Negret},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.23175},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
AMSart style, 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, 19 refs. Version v2 acknowledges Holst's work (2001), adds the asymptotic analysis of $\lambda_{\theta}$, and displays simulations of the Hoppe urn model. Version v3 corresponds to the (slightly corrected and improved) published version