On the uniqueness of Groves mechanisms and the payoff equivalence principle (Q2268126)

This paper establishes a necessary and sufficient condition for uniqueness of Groves mechanisms among efficient, dominant strategy mechanisms in a social choice setting with quasi linear preferences, private valuations and arbitrary sets of alternatives, This condition, which imposes a restriction on the behavior of the one-sided directional derivatives of the valuation functions with respect to individual types, is also shown to be sufficient and necessary to obtain the payoff equivalence principle for dominant strategy mechanisms whose choice rules are affine maximizers. Potential applications include models with uncountable sets of social alternatives, e.g., public goods provision problems and auction design with divisible objects.