Two simplified proofs for Roberts' theorem (Q733788): Difference between revisions

Roberts showed that every social choice function that is ex-post implementable in private value settings must maximize the weighted social welfare. To fully understand the techniques and intuitions behind Roberts' original proof, this paper provides two simplified alternative proofs. The first one uses the same underlying key-point, but significantly simplifies the technical construction around it, thus making the essence visible. The second one is a weaker version, with an additional requirement of ``player decisiveness''. It relies on the cycle monotonicity characterization, and shows how to strengthen this characterization, for the case of unrestricted domains, to yield as a result weighted welfare maximization.