Today I read a paper titled “Average-Case Complexity of Shellsort”
The abstract is:
We prove a general lower bound on the average-case complexity of Shellsort: the average number of data-movements (and comparisons) made by a $p$-pass Shellsort for any incremental sequence is $\Omega (pn^{1 + 1/p)$ for all $p \leq \log n$.
Using similar arguments, we analyze the average-case complexity of several other sorting algorithms.