In 1973, Williams [D. Williams, On Rényi's ‘record’ problem and Engel's series, Bull. London Math. Soc.5 (1973), 235–237] introduced two interesting discrete Markov processes, namely C-processes and A-processes, which are related to record times in statistics and Engel's series in number theory respectively. Moreover, he showed that these two processes share the same classical limit theorems, such as the law of large numbers, central limit theorem and law of the iterated logarithm. In this paper, we consider the large deviations for these two Markov processes, which indicate that there is a difference between C-processes and A-processes in the context of large deviations.

Beginning with a seminal paper of Rényi, expansions in noninteger real bases have been widely studied in the last forty years. They turned out to be relevant in various domains of mathematics, such as the theory of finite automata, number theory, fractals or dynamical systems. Several results were extended by Daróczy and Kátai for expansions in complex bases. We introduce an adaptation of the so-called greedy algorithm to the complex case, and we generalize one of their main theorems.