Asymptotic behavior of edge-reinforced random walks

Abstract

In this article, we study linearly edge-reinforced random walk on general multi-level ladders for large initial edge weights. For infinite ladders, we show that the process can be represented as a random walk in a random environment, given by random weights on the edges. The edge weights decay exponentially in space. The process converges to a stationary process. We provide asymptotic bounds for the range of the random walker up to a given time, showing that it localizes much more than an ordinary random walker. The random environment is described in terms of an infinite-volume Gibbs measure.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117906000000674 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org