Let Q be a quiver of type $\tilde {A}_n$ . Let $\alpha =\alpha _1+\alpha _2+\cdots +\alpha _s$ be the canonical decomposition. For the polynomials $M_Q(\alpha ,q)$ that count the number of isoclasses of representations of Q over ${\mathbb F}_q$ with dimension vector $\alpha $ , we obtain a precise relation between the degree of $M_Q(\alpha ,q)$ and that of $\prod _{i=1}^{s} M_Q(\alpha _i,q)$ for an arbitrary dimension vector $\alpha $ .

Kac introduced the notion of the canonical decomposition for a dimension vector of a quiver. Here we will give an efficient algorithm to compute the canonical decomposition. Our study of the canonical decomposition for quivers with three vertices gives us fractal-like pictures.