Transience/Recurrence and the speed of a one-dimensional random walk in a "have your cookie and eat it" environment

Ross Pinsky

Published 2009-02-06, updated 2009-06-07Version 3

Consider a simple random walk on the integers with the following transition mechanism. At each site $x$, the probability of jumping to the right is $\omega(x)\in[\frac12,1)$, until the first time the process jumps to the left from site $x$, from which time onward the probability of jumping to the right is $\frac12$. We investigate the transience/recurrence properties of this process in both deterministic and stationary, ergodic environments $\{\omega(x)\}_{x\in Z}$. In deterministic environments, we also study the speed of the process.