On the asymptotic behaviour of random recursive trees in random environment

Abstract

We consider growing random recursive trees in random environment, in which at each step a new vertex is attached (by an edge of a random length) to an existing tree vertex according to a probability distribution that assigns the tree vertices masses proportional to their random weights. The main aim of the paper is to study the asymptotic behaviour of the distance from the newly inserted vertex to the tree's root and that of the mean numbers of outgoing vertices as the number of steps tends to infinity. Most of the results are obtained under the assumption that the random weights have a product form with independent identically distributed factors.