MULTIPLICITY ONE PROPERTY AND THE DECOMPOSITION OF b-FUNCTIONS

Abstract

Recently, extensive calculations have been made on b-functions of prehomogeneous vector spaces with reducible representations. By examining the results of these calculations, we observe that b-functions of a large number of reducible prehomogeneous vector spaces have decompositions which seem to be correlated to the decomposition of representations. In the present paper, we show that such phenomena can be ascribed to a certain multiplicity one property for group actions on polynomial rings. Furthermore, we give some criteria for the multiplicity one property. Our method can be applied equally to non-regular prehomogeneous vector spaces.