The Groves Mechanism is often called the VCG Mechanism or the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanism. We do not like that terminology. The mathematical form of the idea is in Vickrey (1961), an auction paper, to be sure, but nobody applied it to anything but auctions. Clarke (1971) comes next chronologically, but what is distinctive about his mechanism is the tax he constructed to ensure that the taxes would at least equal and probably exceed the cost of the project. Groves (1970, 1976, 1979) figured out the ``trick'' independently in his dissertation, published later, and has the simplest version. Short name are better than long ones (consider the abomination ``Herfindahl-Hirschman Index'') and it is more important that names be useful than that they commemorate we scholars. If too long, they become acronyms, which are pernicious because meaningless in themselves.
By the way: Prof. Clarke is dead, but Prof. Groves still has a web page at UC San Diego. Should he be given a Nobel Prize, as Vickrey was? I think he's a good candidate.
