We study the asymptotic behaviour of once-reinforced biased random walk (ORbRW) on Galton-Watson trees. Here the underlying (unreinforced) random walk has a bias towards or away from the root. We prove that in the setting of multiplicative once-reinforcement the ORbRW can be recurrent even when the underlying biased random walk is ballistic. We also prove that, on Galton-Watson trees without leaves, the speed is positive in the transient regime. Finally, we prove that, on regular trees, the speed of the ORbRW is monotone decreasing in the reinforcement parameter when the underlying random walk has high speed, and the reinforcement parameter is small.The proof of Theorem 1.12 is inspired by work of Ben Arous, Fribergh and Sidoravicius [4], who proved a partial monotonicity result for biased random walks on Galton-Watson trees via a nice and natural coupling. Here we needed to adapt this idea to find a coupling which works for certain self-interacting walks. We have taken some care to extract the general features of the argument (which are relatively simple) and the details of the coupling for our particular setting (which are highly non-trivial). This general method provides a coupling alternative to expansion techniques (e.g. [10]) when the self-interacting random walk has a large bias independent of the history.
The modelConsider a rooted tree G = (V, E) (where V is the set of vertices and E is the set of edges), augmented by adding a parent −1 to the root , the two being connected by an edge. If two vertices ν and µ are the endpoints of the same edge, they are said to be neighbours, and this property is denoted by ν ∼ µ. The distance d(ν, µ) between any pair of vertices ν, µ, not necessarily adjacent, is the number of edges in the unique self-avoiding path connecting ν to µ. We set | −1 | = −1. For any other vertex ν, we let |ν| be the distance from ν to the root . We use ν −1 to denote the parent of ν, and (ν i ) i∈[∂(ν)] , its children, where ∂(ν) is the number of offspring of ν and [n] := {1, 2, . . . , n}. Write C ν = {ν 1 , . . . , ν ∂(ν) }. For µ ∈ V \ { −1 } we write ν < µ, if ν is an ancestor of µ, i.e. ν lies on the self-avoiding path connecting µ to −1 , and we write ν ≤ µ if ν < µ or ν = µ. If ν < µ then µ is said to be a descendant of ν.We are now about to define MAD walks, standing for maximum acts differently, in reference to their behavior on Z. Fix G = (V, E) and parameters u 1 , u 0 > 0 and define the law P G of a MAD walk X = (X n ) n∈Z + , taking values on the vertices of G (and taking nearest neighbour steps) as follows. We set X 0 = −1 . Given F n = σ(X k : k ≤ n), we let E ∅ (n) = {[X k−1 , X k ] : k ≤ n} ⊂ E denote the set of (undirected) edges crossed by time n.For ν = −1 define W n (ν, ν −1 ) = 1, (1.1)