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Coefficients of the Inflated Eulerian Polynomial

It follows from work of Chung and Graham that for a certain family of polynomials $T_{n}(x)$, derived from the descent statistic on permutations, the coefficient sequence of $T_{n-1}(x)$ coincides with that of the polynomial $T_{n}(x)/\left(1+x+\cdots+x^{n-1}\right)$. We observed computationally that the inflated $\mathbf{s}$-Eulerian polynomial $Q_{n}^{(\mathbf{s})}(x)$, which satisfies $Q_{n}^{(\mathbf{s})}(x) = T_{n}(x)$ when $\mathbf{s}=(1,2,\ldots,n)$, also satisfies this property for many sequences $\mathbf{s}$. In this work we characterize those sequences $\mathbf{s}$ for which the coefficient sequence of $Q_{n-1}^{(\mathbf{s})}(x)$ coincides with that of the polynomial $Q_{n}^{(\mathbf{s})}(x)/\left(1+x+\cdots+x^{s_{n}-1}\right)$. In particular, we show that all nondecreasing sequences satisfy this property. We also settle a conjecture of Pensyl and Savage by showing that the inflated $\mathbf{s}$-Eulerian polynomials are unimodal for all choices of positive integer sequences ${\bf s}$. In addition, we determine when these polynomials are palindromic and show our characterization is equivalent to another of Beck, Braun, Köppe, Savage, and Zafeirakopoulos.