arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Mark Voorneveld.
Fixed point theorems are ubiquitous in economic research. Many studies cite Smithson (1971) ``Fixed points of order preserving multifunctions,'' yet the original proof contains errors. This note presents a new, concise proof and explains why Smithson's argument is invalid. It also contains new results on the structure of the set of fixed points and monotone comparative statics.
Fourier-Motzkin elimination, a standard method for solving systems of linear inequalities, leads to an elementary, short, and self-contained proof of von Neumann's minimax theorem.
We give an elementary proof of Brouwer's fixed-point theorem. The only mathematical prerequisite is a version of the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem: a sequence in a compact subset of $n$-dimensional Euclidean space has a convergent subsequence with a limit in that set. Our main tool is a `no-bullying' lemma for agents with preferences over indivisible goods. What does this lemma claim? Consider a finite number of children, each with a single indivisible good (a toy) and preferences over those toys. Let's say that a group of children, possibly after exchanging toys, could bully some poor kid if all group members find their own current toy better than the toy of this victim. The no-bullying lemma asserts that some group $S$ of children can redistribute their toys among themselves in such a way that all members of $S$ get their favorite toy from $S$, but they cannot bully anyone.
Three central results in economic theory --- Brouwer's fixed-point theorem, Sperner's lemma, and the Knaster-Kuratowski-Mazurkiewicz (KKM) lemma --- are known to be equivalent. In almost all cases, elementary direct proofs of one of these results using any of the others are easily found in the literature. This seems not to be the case for the claim that the KKM lemma implies Sperner's lemma. The goal of this note is to provide such a proof.
This note generalizes Berge's maximum theorem to noncompact image sets. It is also clarifies the results from E.A. Feinberg, P.O. Kasyanov, N.V. Zadoianchuk, "Berge's theorem for noncompact image sets," J. Math. Anal. Appl. 397(1)(2013), pp. 255-259 on the extension to noncompact image sets of another Berge's theorem, that states semi-continuity of value functions. Here we explain that the notion of a $\K$-inf-compact function introduced there is applicable to metrizable topological spaces and to more general compactly generated topological spaces. For Hausdorff topological spaces we introduce the notion of a $\K\N$-inf-compact function ($\N$ stands for "nets" in $\K$-inf-compactness), which coincides with $\K$-inf-compactness for compactly generated and, in particular, for metrizable topological spaces.
The minority game is a simple congestion game in which the players' main goal is to choose among two options the one that is adopted by the smallest number of players. We characterize the set of Nash equilibria and the limiting behavior of several well-known learning processes in the minority game with an arbitrary odd number of players. Interestingly, different learning processes provide considerably different predictions.