On Completion Times under Memoryless Catastrophe

Source abstract

We study the completion time of a task subject to independent reset (catastrophe) at each step. The completion-time PGF depends on the base-process PGF through an affine relation, and we exploit this structure systematically. Our main result shows that, among age-based catastrophe mechanisms, geometric-tail catastrophe is exactly the class that yields uniform affine PGF structure; in continuous time, the characterization sharpens to Poisson resetting. We establish a sharp two-sided Kolmogorov bound of order $p+|α|$ for the exponential approximation $d_K(T/E[T], \mathrm{Exp}(1))$, thereby closing a logarithmic gap. Applications to the coupon collector with reset coupons reveal a discontinuous Gumbel-to-Exponential transition under resetting, while a multi-phase model exhibits a Gaussian-to-exponential transition with exponential convergence rate.