Recursions for Excedance number in some permutations groups

Abstract

The excedance number for S_n is known to have an Eulerian distribution. Nevertheless, the classical proof uses descents rather than excedances. We present a direct recursive proof which seems to be folklore and extend it to the colored permutation groups G_r,n. The generalized recursion yields some interesting connection to Stirling numbers of the second kind. We also show some logconcavity result concerning a variant of the excedance number. Finally, we show that the generating function of the excedance number defined on G_r,n is symmetric.