 Solution

For this model, the Gauss-Markov theorem states that $\hat{\beta }$ is the unique minimum-variance linear unbiased estimator of $\beta$: ifis unbiased for every $\beta$, then $\mathrm{var}(\tilde{\beta })\ge \mathrm{var}(\hat{\beta })$.

Indeed,so unbiasedness is equivalent to ${\sum }_i{a}_i{x}_i=1$. WriteThe constraint becomes ${\sum }_i{c}_i{x}_i=0$. Since the errors are independent with common variance ${\sigma }^2$,Equality holds exactly when every $c_i=0$, which gives $a_i=x_i/S_{xx}$ and $\tilde{\beta }=\hat{\beta }$.