Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 iii Paper 35 5 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
It is useful to prove the general core of the miners game calculation when miners carry one unit: , with . Individual rationality gives , and efficiency gives .
If , the grand coalition value is zero and the only core allocation is zero. If , every -person coalition must receive at least one. Sum these inequalities over all such coalitions. Each player appears times, soIf does not divide , then , a contradiction. Thus the core of a cooperative game is empty in these cases.
If , every proper coalition has value zero. The core is exactly the simplex of nonnegative allocations with total one. If is a multiple of with , the averaged inequality is equality. Since each -person coalition sum is at least one, every such sum equals one. For any two players , choose other players and compare the two resulting -person coalition sums. They imply . Hence for all players. This vector belongs to the core because for every coalition.