English

Radial Transform Extremality for the Siblings of the Coupon Collector

Probability 2026-06-30 v1

Abstract

In the siblings version of the coupon collector, a main collector stops when every coupon type has appeared once. Duplicates are passed successively to siblings, and UjNU_j^N denotes the number of empty spaces in the jjth collector's album at the main completion time. We prove finite-NN radial transform strengthenings of the uniform-probability extremality principle. For every N2N\ge2, every j2j\ge2, every positive nonuniform probability vector pp, and the ray p(θ)=u+θ(pu)p(\theta)=u+\theta(p-u) from the uniform vector uu, the full probability generating function Ep(θ)zUjN\mathbb{E}_{p(\theta)}z^{U_j^N} is strictly decreasing in θ\theta for z>1z>1 and strictly increasing in θ\theta for 0<z<10<z<1. Thus the same full PGF has opposite radial monotonicity on the two sides of z=1z=1, the left side giving a radial Laplace-transform order. At the coefficient level, along every nonconstant ray from the uniform vector, uniform probabilities maximize every binomial moment of UjNU_j^N, equivalently giving a finite absolutely-monotone/binomial-transform order. The proof of the right-PGF and binomial-moment theorem is exact and finite-dimensional. It uses Poissonization, a marked Poissonized PGF identity, a normalized alternating subset expansion, and a positive-kernel radial derivative formula obtained from a local cumulative-polynomial dissipation lemma. The Laplace-transform theorem follows from a separate Gamma-mixture race representation.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.31391,
  title  = {Radial Transform Extremality for the Siblings of the Coupon Collector},
  author = {Christopher D. Long},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.31391},
  year   = {2026}
}

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19 pages, 0 figures