THE EXPECTED JAGGEDNESS OF ORDER IDEALS

The jaggedness of an order ideal $I$ in a poset $P$ is the number of maximal elements in $I$ plus the number of minimal elements of $P$ not in $I$. A probability distribution on the set of order ideals of $P$ is toggle-symmetric if for every $p\in P$, the probability that $p$ is maximal in $I$ equals the probability that $p$ is minimal not in $I$. In this paper, we prove a formula for the expected jaggedness of an order ideal of $P$ under any toggle-symmetric probability distribution when $P$ is the poset of boxes in a skew Young diagram. Our result extends the main combinatorial theorem of Chan–López–Pflueger–Teixidor [Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., forthcoming. 2015, arXiv:1506.00516], who used an expected jaggedness computation as a key ingredient to prove an algebro-geometric formula; and it has applications to homomesies, in the sense of Propp–Roby, of the antichain cardinality statistic for order ideals in partially ordered sets.

Abstract licence: CC BY-ND

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