Letter from Kashmir

Colonel S.W. “Syd” Thomson, D.S.O., M.C., CD. Joined the Rocky Mountain Rangers in the 1930s transferring to the Seqforth Highlanders at the outbreak of war. Wounded in Sicily, he returned to serve as Company Commander, Second-in-Command and Commanding Officer of the Battalion. In October 1944 he was promoted to Acting Colonel and sent to England to command an infantry training unit at Aldershot. In April 1945 he reverted to Lieut.-Colonel to take command of the Black Watch. Colonel Thomson volunteered for the Pacific Force and remained in the Army until 1946. He rejoined the forces to serve with the United Nations Military Observers Group in Pakistan. This letter to “Big” Jim Stone (Lieut.-Colonel Jim Stone D.S.O., M.C., CD.) is one of several colourful accounts of his service in Kashmir. Colonel Thomson’s letters will be a regular feature in CMH

The Sourcerer's Apprentice

This assignment considers the use of the apprenticeship model of teaching in academic subject areas. This has been investigated by various authors since 1989. I will consider the various flavors of the techniques presented and some of the practical implications of these. I will draw from our experience running several courses where students undertake business like projects within a protective environment

Borrowing-proofness of the Lindahl rule in Kolm triangle economies

In the context of a simple model of public good provision, we study the requirement on an allocation rule that it be immune to manipulation by augmenting one's endowment through borrowing from the outside world. We call it open-economy borrowing-proofness (Thomson, 2009). We ask whether the Lindahl rule satisfies the property. The answer is yes on both the domain of quasi-linear economies and on the domain of homothetic economies. However, on the classical domain (when preferences are only required to be continuous, monotone, and convex), the answer is negative. We compare the manipulability of the rule through borrowing and its manipulability through withholding. We also asks whether the rule is immune to manipulation by borrowing from a fellow trader, closed-economy borrowing-proofness. We obtain a parallel set of answers. The negative results hold no matter how small the amount borrowed is constrained to be.Public good; Lindahl rule; Kolm triangle; borrowing-proofness; withholding-proofness.

Divide-and-Permute

We construct "simple" games implementing in Nash equilibria several solutions to the problem of fair division. These solutions are the no-envy solution, which selects the allocations such that no agent would prefer someone else's bundle to his own, and several variants of this solution. Components of strategies can be interpreted as allocations, consumption bundles, permutations, points in simplices of dimensionalities equal to the number of goods or to the number of agents, and integers. We also propose a simple game implementing the Pareto solution and games implementing the intersections of the Pareto solution with each of these solutions.Nash implementation. No-envy. Divide-and-permute.