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In this note we evaluate the expected waiting time to complete a collection of coupons, in the case of coupons which arrives in groups of constant size, independently and with unequal probabilities. As an application we will be able to…

Probability · Mathematics 2012-10-08 Marco Ferrante , Nadia Frigo

This paper is about the Coupon collector's problem. There are some coupons, or baseball cards, or other plastic knick-knacks that are put into bags of chips or under soda bottles, etc. A collector starts collecting these trinkets and wants…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-03-11 Rohit Pandey

We consider a generalisation of the classical coupon collector's problem, in which at each time step a collector either receives a new copy of a randomly chosen coupon, or loses all their previously collected copies of that coupon. We…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Luke J. Attrill , Timothy M. Garoni

We study in this paper a generalized coupon collector problem, which consists in determining the distribution and the moments of the time needed to collect a given number of distinct coupons that are drawn from a set of coupons with an…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-02-24 Emmanuelle Anceaume , Yann Busnel , Bruno Sericola

The Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) is a well-known combinatorial problem that seeks to estimate the number of random draws required to complete a collection of $n$ distinct coupon types. Various generalizations of this problem have been…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hadas Abraham , Ido Feldman , Eitan Yaakobi

In this note, we introduce a distributed twist on the classic coupon collector problem: a set of $m$ collectors wish to each obtain a set of $n$ coupons; for this, they can each sample coupons uniformly at random, but can also meet in…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Dan Alistarh , Peter Davies

This Ph.D. thesis concerns the version of the classical coupon collector's problem, when a collector samples with replacement a set of $n\ge 2$ distinct coupons so that at each time any one of the $n$ coupons is drawn with the same…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-07-27 Anna Pósfai

Consider the coupon collector problem where each box of a brand of cereal contains a coupon and there are n different types of coupons. Suppose that the probability of a box containing a coupon of a specific type is $1/n$ and that we keep…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-06-13 J. C. Saunders

We study in this paper a generalized coupon collector problem, which consists in analyzing the time needed to collect a given number of distinct coupons that are drawn from a set of coupons with an arbitrary probability distribution. We…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-04-16 Emmanuelle Anceaume , Yann Busnel , Ernst Schulte-Geers , Bruno Sericola

This paper provides analysis to a generalized version of the coupon collector problem, in which the collector gets $d$ distinct coupons each run and she chooses the one that she has the least so far. On the asymptotic case when the number…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Weiyu Xu , Ao Kevin Tang

We generalize the well-known Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) in combinatorics. Our problem is to find the minimum and expected number of draws, with replacement, required to recover $n$ distinctly labeled coupons, with each draw consisting…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Andrew Tan , Oriel Limor , Daniella Bar-Lev , Ryan Gabrys , Zohar Yakhini , Paul H. Siegel

The article explores the asymptotic behavior of the expected number of drawings in the Coupon Collector's Problem with group-drawing under the uniform distribution. In this variant, each draw consists of a package of $s$ distinct coupons…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Daniel Berend , Tomer Sher

We extend the classical coupon collector's problem to one in which two collectors are simultaneously and independently seeking collections of $d$ coupons. We find, in finite terms, the probability that the two collectors finish at the same…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Amy N. Myers , Herbert S. Wilf

Based upon inequalities on Subset Probabilities, proofs of several conjectures on the Generalized Coupon Collector Problem (i.e. CCP with unequal popularity) are presented. Then we derive a very simple asymptotic relation between the…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-06-19 Christian Berthet

A collector wishes to collect $m$ complete sets of $N$ distinct coupons. The draws from the population are considered to be independent and identical distributed with replacement, and the probability that a type-$j$ coupon is drawn is noted…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-11-02 Aristides V. Doumas , Vassilis G. Papanicolaou

A popular variant of the collector's problem is the following: Assume there are $N$ different types of coupons with equal occurring probabilities. There is one main collector who collects coupons. When she gets a "double," she gives it to…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-05-13 Vassilis G. Papanicolaou , Aristides V. Doumas

In the classical coupon collector's problem, every box of breakfast cereal contains one coupon from a collection of n distinct coupons, each equally likely to appear. The goal is to find the expected number of boxes a player needs to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-02-22 Tipaluck Krityakierne , Thotsaporn Aek Thanatipanonda

The following variant of the collector's problem has attracted considerable attention relatively recently (see, e.g., N. Pintacuda 1980, D. Foata H. Guo-Niu and B. Lass 2001, D. Foata and D. Zeilberger 2003, I. Adler, S. Oren and S. Ross…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-12-16 Aristides V. Doumas , Vassilis G. Papanicolaou

Motivated by a problem in the theory of randomized search heuristics, we give a very precise analysis for the coupon collector problem where the collector starts with a random set of coupons (chosen uniformly from all sets). We show that…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-08-01 Benjamin Doerr , Carola Doerr

This paper gives an algebraic proof of the correctness of Von Schelling formula for the probability of the coupon collector problem waiting time for non-uniform distributions and partial collections. It introduces a theorem on sums of…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Christian Berthet
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