Decomposing the Secondary Cayley Polytope

The vertices of the secondary polytope of a point configuration correspond to its regular triangulations. The Cayley trick links triangulations of one point configuration, called the Cayley polytope, to the fine mixed subdivisions of a tuple of point configurations. In this paper we investigate the secondary polytope of this Cayley polytope. Its vertices correspond to all regular mixed subdivisions of a tuple of point configurations. We demonstrate that it equals the Minkowski sum of polytopes, which we call mixed secondary polytopes, whose vertices correspond to regular-cell configurations. Received October 1, 1998, and in revised form July 23, 1999.