Edward Clarke’s Struggles

The Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism is a cornerstone of public choice theory. Edward Clarke's 1971 paper is the most cited article ever published in Public Choice, yet he remains a marginal figure in economics, and his contribution has not been studied systematically. Drawing on extensive archival sources, we analyze the intellectual conditions that formed Clarke's idea and its reception in the public choice community. Methodologically, rather than treating the VCG mechanism as a settled, finished result, we reconstruct the contingent process through which economists arrived at competing formulations. We reveal how scientific credit depended not only on priority of discovery but also on institutional support and clear communication according to disciplinary standards. Due to problems of exposition, Clarke initially failed to convince colleagues of his solution to Samuelson's challenge, retarding the completion of his PhD by nearly a decade. By then, the reformulation provided by Tideman and Tullock, and the more general treatment of the problem of free riding proposed by Groves and Ledyard, were receiving more attention. The paper contributes to the history of public choice by clarifying the development of demandrevealing mechanisms in the 1970s and by illustrating the difficulties of attributing scientific credit in cases of "simultaneous inventions" at a time of emerging field boundaries.