Gravitational allocation to Poisson points

Abstract

For d>=3, we construct a non-randomized, fair and translation-equivariant allocation of Lebesgue measure to the points of a standard Poisson point process in R^d, defined by allocating to each of the Poisson points its basin of attraction with respect to the flow induced by a gravitational force field exerted by the points of the Poisson process. We prove that this allocation rule is economical in the sense that the "allocation diameter", defined as the diameter X of the basin of attraction containing the origin, is a random variable with a rapidly decaying tail. Specifically, we have the tail bound: P(X > R) < C exp[ -c R(log R)^(alpha_d) ], for all R>2, where: alpha_d = (d-2)/d for d>=4; alpha_3 can be taken as any number <-4/3; and C,c are positive constants that depend on d and alpha_d. This is the first construction of an allocation rule of Lebesgue measure to a Poisson point process with subpolynomial decay of the tail P(X>R).