Additive Decompositions, Random Allocations, and Threshold Phenomena

Abstract

An additive decomposition of a set $I$ of nonnegative integers is an expression of $I$ as the arithmetic sum of two other such sets. If the smaller of these has $p$ elements, we have a $p$-decomposition. If $I$ is obtained by randomly removing $n^{\alpha}$ integers from $\{0,\dots,n-1\}$, decomposability translates into a balls-and-urns problem, which we start to investigate (for large $n$) by first showing that the number of $p$-decompositions exhibits a threshold phenomenon as $\alpha$ crosses a $p$-dependent critical value. We then study in detail the distribution of the number of 2-decompositions. For this last case we show that the threshold is sharp and we establish the threshold function.