Tomer Sher (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)

Thursday, July 6, 2023, 11:10 – 12:00, -101

Abstract:

The Coupon Collector’s Problem (CCP) reads as follows: how many drawings are needed on average in order to complete a collection of $n$ types of coupons, if at each step a single coupon is drawn uniformly randomly with replacement, independently of all the other drawings? This problem was introduced by De-Moivre over 300 years ago. We will discuss about a generalization of the problem, where instead of drawing a single coupon each time we draw a ``package” of coupons of size $s$ and ask the following question: how does the distribution over the collection of possible .packages affect the expected number of drawings needed to complete a collection?