The relation between monotonicity and strategy-proofness

Abstract

The Muller–Satterthwaite Theorem (J Econ Theory 14:412–418, 1977) establishes the equivalence between Maskin monotonicity and strategy-proofness, two cornerstone conditions for the decentralization of social choice rules. We consider a general model that covers public goods economies as in Muller–Satterthwaite (J Econ Theory 14:412–418, 1977) as well as private goods economies. For private goods economies, we use a weaker condition than Maskin monotonicity that we call unilateral monotonicity. We introduce two easy-to-check preference domain conditions which separately guarantee that (i) unilateral/Maskin monotonicity implies strategy-proofness (Theorem 1) and (ii) strategy-proofness implies unilateral/Maskin monotonicity (Theorem 2). We introduce and discuss various classical single-peaked preference domains and show which of the domain conditions they satisfy (see Propositions 1 and 2 and an overview in Table 1). As a by-product of our analysis, we obtain some extensions of the Muller–Satterthwaite Theorem as summarized in Theorem 3. We also discuss some new “Muller–Satterthwaite preference domains” (e.g., Proposition 3).