Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2018/ib/paper-3/21h/i/solution

The Lagrange sufficiency theorem says that if a feasible point and nonnegative multipliers satisfy complementary slackness and globally maximizes the Lagrangian function in constrained optimization, then globally solves the constrained maximization problem. Indeed, for every feasible , the signs of the constraints give . Concavity and the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions are a common way to verify the global Lagrangian maximum.
For fixed , A maximizes
subject to and . This is a concave function of . On every active coordinate, the multiplier equation is
Thus A's optimal allocation is given by the water-filling algorithm:
where is chosen so that . Coordinates with zero expression receive no resource. This is a water-filling algorithm. The formula gives the optimum when every . If , any already gives A the whole market in that region, so A assigns such coordinates arbitrarily small positive amounts and applies water filling to the remaining budget; without a convention for , the resulting value can be a supremum rather than an attained maximum.

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