<p>This paper considers the classic mechanism design problem—maximizing an objective subject to a system of incentive compatibility constraints. This problem has been studied extensively in the case of quasilinear preferences, but the general case has received little attention in the mechanism design literature. This paper studies the general case, considering separately the incentive structure and implied incentive compatible linkages, then evaluating incentive compatible variations relative to an arbitrary objective function. This provides a new method and perspective to the optimization problem. When bunching occurs, it’s not possible to implement the ‘ironing’ technique, but the method here carries over directly to this case. One special case of this model is examined in detail—where there is risk aversion in preferences and the objective. Finally, for the general case, a simple numerical optimization routine is given to determine an approximate solution.</p>