A Counterexample to the Shuffle Compatiblity Conjecture

Abstract

The shuffle product has a connection with several useful permutation statistics such as descent and peak, and corresponds to the multiplication operation in the corresponding descent and peak algebras. Gessel and Zhuang formalized the notion of shuffle-compatibility and studied various permutation statistics from this viewpoint. They further conjectured that any shuffle compatible permutation statistic is a descent statistic. In this note we construct a counter-example to this conjecture.