A Characterization of Strategy-Proof Social Choice Functions for Economies with Pure Public Goods

Salvador Barberà () and Matthew Jackson

No 964, Discussion Papers from Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science

Abstract: We characterize strategy-proof social choice functions when individual have strictly quasi-concave, continuous and satiated utility functions on convex subsets |R^l, representing preferences for the provision of l pure public goods. When specialized to the case l=1, these assumptions amount to requiring that preferences are single peaked, and for such a domain there exists a wide class of strategy-proof social choice functions. These were studied by Moulin (1980) under additional assumptions. Our first results characterize the complete class, after an appropriate extension of the single-peakedness condition. The new characterization retains the flavor of Moulin's elegant representation theorem. For the general l-dimensional case, previous results have shown that there is no efficient, strategy-proof, nondictatorial social choice function, even within the domain restrictions under consideration [Border and Jordan (1983), Zhou (1991)]. In fact, Zhou's powerful results indicates that nondictatorial strategy-proof s.c.f.'s will have a range of dimension one. This allows us to conclude with a complete characterization of all strategy-proof s.c.f.'s on |R^l, because restrictions of preferences from our admissible class to one dimensional subsets satisfy the slightly generalized notion of single-peakedness that is used in our characterization for the case l=1. We feel that a complete knowledge of the class of strategy-proof mechanisms, in this as well as in other contexts, is an important step in the analysis of the trade-offs between strategy-proofness and other performance criteria, like efficiency.

Date: 1991-05
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