Convex Potentials with an Application to Mechanism Design

Abstract

This paper establishes a general form of the "payoff equivalence" result in mechanism design theory: under certain conditions, the utility of any type in an incentive-compatible mechanism is determined up to an additive constant by the allocation rule alone. When types are single-dimensional the result is well known (see, for instance, Myerson (1981)). When types are multi-dimensional the result follows from the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus once sufficient smoothness is assumed. We obtain a more general result by using an extension of the Fundamental Theorem to nonsmooth convex functions and more generally, to the class of regular Lipschitzian functions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 140 citations exist upstream.