Deciding uniqueness in norm maximization

NP-hardness is established for the problem whose instance is a system of linear inequalities defining a polytopeP, and whose question is whether, onP, the global maximum of the Euclidean norm is attained at more than one vertex ofP. The NP-hardness persists even for the restricted problem in whichP is a full-dimensional parallelotope with one vertex at the origin. This makes it possible to establish NP-hardness for other uniqueness problems, including some from pseudoboolean programming and computational convexity.Research of the first author was supported in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Research of the second author was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.