Waiting Time for a Small Subcollection in the Coupon Collector Problem with Universal Coupon

Abstract

We consider a generalization of the classical coupon collector problem, where the set of available coupons consists of standard coupons (which can be part of the collection), and two coupons with special purposes: one that speeds up the collection process and one that slows it down. We obtain several asymptotic results related to the expectation and the variance of the waiting time until a portion of the collection is sampled, as the number of standard coupons tends to infinity.